<

Google Talk everywhere – first step

I’m surprised this didn’t happen way back in early 2005, but here are the first steps towards unification of mobile and email contacts. Research In Motion, the creators of the Blackberry, have announced a version of Google Talk for the Blackberry, to be out in a month’s time. Hope to see one for the immensely successful Nokia Series60 too.

Another great step forward is “opening up” the Google Talk network to any XMPP-compliant client network. That means, as the GoogleTalk blog says, “Google Talk users can now chat with users on other XMPP services and vice versa”.

Finally, by releasing an API for Google’s implementation (libjingle) of Jingle, the peer-to-peer session extension to XMPP, Google Talk now has immense interoperability! This is a wonderful step towards popularising Google Talk. By focussing on the network, not the client itself, Google’s laid the groundwork for establishing Jingle as the protocol of choice for instant messaging. Additionally, once again, Google has shown how they are adroitly using the community to enhance/extend/popularise their products, by open standards, as opposed to lock-in. This is a Good Thing. As the GoogleTalk Blog says, this opens up additional capabilities:

  • Voice calls between other PC IM/VOIP clients such as Gaim, Adium, Psi, etc. and Google Talk.
  • Voice calls between mobile devices and Google Talk.
  • Peer-to-peer applications.

The last two are particularly interesting (the last one in the mobile context), since we have finally begun to unify the mobile space and the Internet space. (Think – simply using your mobile borwser to browse the Internet isn’t any substantial unification). Once we have applications that work across devices – whether it’s a mobile device, or your computer, or, for that matter, any consumer electronics device, that’s when we’re talking True Unification. More on unification in an upcoming article.


January 18, 2006 ·  Post to Twitter ·  Email this ·  BlackBerry, Google, IM, Insights, Internet, Mobile ·  Leave a Comment


You might also be interested reading:

Post your comment