Google Service Choice

And What It Means To You, Me and Everyone

Google is now serious about what they are calling “Service Choice”. What this means is that Google Talk, which was already running on a XMPP server, is now allowing communications with other XMPP servers, most notably Jabber, which a number of us provide as a service of our little amateur ISPs via the open-source jabberd.

In turn, jabberd supports transports, which are plugins that allow the server to log into other chat networks on users’ behalf, adding those networks’ contacts into the Jabber roster. Users of my own Jabber server have access to their AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! IM and MSN contacts, as well as any contacts on XMPP-compliant networks. Now they will also have access to Google Talk users, making it possible to consolidate all of the major chat networks under one login process, and in one client.

Google says that they want to make IM as ubiquitous as email, and they’ve taken great steps to make sure they’re pushing it in the right direction.