Got some emails today from friends inviting me to use Google Talk. As I fortunately do not have to use Windows at home or at work (or rather have chosen not to waste time with it, life is too short), I cannot yet use Google’s client.
But all is not lost. Because the service uses the Jabber protocol
(XMPP), and because Google has a “Developer’s
FAQ” that spells out the
details, it was relatively easy to configure my favourite IM client
(Fire), for Mac OS X to connect to the
talk.google.com server1.
In principle, any client will do for IM, as long as it supports secure connections to a Jabber-protocol server. Hopefully, some third party clients will include in the near future the capability of doing VOIP (like Google’s client does) once the details of the protocol/API are released.