Google Talk notes

Since Google Talk is based on the Jabber protocol (XMPP) it's been compatible with any jabber client for instant messaging. That was a well and good move. Very welcoming to see a big name use an open protocol that can be implemented by anyone. There were some concerns though that the voice talk features were only supported in the Google Talk client and so, no one else would be able to get in on the voice features.

That is being opened up as well. There are now two proposed extensions to XMPP (jingle and jingle audio) which cover the voice features that Google's using and they've released their own libjingle to make the functionality easier for developers to implement. Good news. It looks as though the extensions being considered were proposed by the Jabber Software Foundation (JSF) and will be looked at/improved by the community. It's promising to see them going this route rather than the "take open protocol, embrace and add proprietary extensions..." Hopefully there will soon be other implementations by Google of the XMPP protocol and allow the (is delegation the right word?) communication of jabber servers one to another with Google's the way it was designed to behave.

In other Google talk news.... this comes as no surprise, they plan to introduce VOIP services at some point and will be in competition with Skype.