Talk Talk Talk
Google have now released their new Instant Message solution. Well, truth be told, most of it isn’t new, it’s XMPP, or what’s commonly known as the underside of Jabber.
What does it offer?
-IM
-GMail Integration
-Small program
-Probably less downtime than MSN (speculation)
-VOICE!!! (with dynamic range features)
The client offers a nice interface in a relatively light application (but, then one should consider it handles only one protocol and is the size of my multi-protocol client). In general however, as far as IM goes it offers nothing new. Here’s the kicker though - it offers dynamic range voice communications. READ: easy to use end user VOIP solutions. This is great for Joe Blogs etc, but what about the impacts that have not been predicted. One such example would be coverage of Telecommunications laws in several countries among other things.
One thing I am interested in, is the specification of this authentication mechanism:
RECV: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><stream :stream from="gmail.com" id="<!--edit-->" version="1.0" xmlns:stream="http://etherx.jabber.org/streams" xmlns="jabber:client"></stream><stream :features><starttls xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-tls"/><mechanisms xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-sasl"><mechanism>X-GOOGLE-TOKEN</mechanism></mechanisms></stream> SEND: <auth xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-sasl" mechanism="X-GOOGLE-TOKEN"><!--edit: long encrypted string here--></auth> RECV: <success xmlns="urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-sasl"/>
And also the specification of the voice components. All are supposedly documented, but un-released. Support for inter-server communications is apparently “on it’s way”, but also as yet unreleased. Until these things happen I can’t see a major transition occurring. Once they have added gsm/speex support and fixed the issues with server connectivity, this may well change. At least, we should see most clients come to support at least one of gTalk’s VOIP features (apparently SIP inter-op. is en-route too).
The introduction of all of these technologies into the IM fray should, as I said on FD today, persuade other IM competitors to start building interoperability services as well. With any luck IM should get far less upsetting in a few years time, but possibly as early as Christmas of this year. If laws have to be passed to make this legal in some countries, then that will simply have to happen - global communications should not be a traded commodity, in this I completely agree with Google.
FOR THOSE OF YOU THAT WANT TO USE ANOTHER CLIENT
The Google Talk server is quoted as “talk.google.com”, however it’s interesting that the RDNS for this box is toolbar.google.com.
Specifically, you should just need these settings:
JID (Jabber ID): [username]@gmail.com
Server: talk.google.com
Port: 5222
Authenticate As: [username]
Resource: GoogleIM
N.B. This requires TLS support, SSL is not accepted by the server.