Nice to see Google’s much vaunted IM solution finally break cover as Google Talk, and under the covers their IM is a Jabber / XMPP solution. The only real shame so far is the odd slightly odd setup of the whole thing.

For instance, as Mark notes the JID is of the form user@gmail.com and the server is talk.google.com – most other Jabber servers use the same addresses for both i.e. user@example.com on example.com – still this isn’t a show stopper for many Jabber clients, and Google provide details for using these, or you could of course use Google’s own client if you’re on Windows.

I found the supplied details for Psi didn’t actually work, to get it working I had use SSL encryption and allow plain text logins on port 5223 rather than the suggested port 5222 (thanks Pedro), the revised details (as shown in the dialog box on the left) being as follows:

• Open Psi.
• Click the Psi symbol in the bottom-left corner, and select ‘Account Setup.’
• Click ‘Add’ in the ‘Psi: Jabber Accounts’ window.
• Enter a name for your account in the ‘Name:’ field (we suggest ‘Google Talk’). Also, make sure that the box next to ‘Register new account’ is not checked.
• Click ‘Add.’
• Enter your full Gmail email address in the ‘Jabber ID:’ field (including ’@gmail.com’).
• Open the ‘Connection’ tab.
• Check the boxes next to ‘Use SSL encryption (to server)’, ‘Allow Plaintext Login’, ‘Send “Keep-alive” packets (for NAT timeouts)’, and ‘Manually Specify Server Host/Port:’.
• Enter ‘talk.google.com’ in the ‘Host:’ field, and enter ‘5223’ in the ‘Port:’ field.
• Click ‘Save.’

The other odd things are Google’s insistance on a restricted federation approach rather than the conventional open Jabber server-to-server communication, SPIM (Instant messaging’s version of SPAM) is not a problem on Jabber for architectural reasons, so retricting Google Talk users to a walled garden seems rather lame and a complete contradiction of their stated aims of service choice. Maybe this will change, I certainly hope so. The only folks in my Google Talk roster are also in my far larger Jabber roster, guess which I’ll use out of choice…

Btw, I’ve noticed that my publicised JID is a little out of date, my primary JID these days is jimh(at)jabber.org.uk and I’ll be using TacoJim(at)gmail.com for testing for a while, feel free to ping me is I'm marked as available.