Google Opens Google Talk Communications With Other Jabber Servers, Skype Video

Google has been more supportive of opensource and open standards than a lot of other companies lately. Their instant messenger, Google Talk, is jabber based, but up until now they weren't allowing communication between servers. Today they added this feature, which allows people using google talk to communicate with other jabber users on servers with this feature. I'm having some trouble wording this well, so as an example, I could use my Talk account to instant message my friend's account on jabber.org (I have tested this). 

If your not familiar with the jabber protocol (its not too well known), "screen names" are formatted like email addresses ( user@server). This identification can optionally have another handle added to the end with a slash, which indicates which "instance" of the other person you want to contact. For example, I could be logged into the same jabber account on my desktop and my pocket pc. I might be mben12@gmail.com/Gaim on my desktop pc and mben12@gmail.com/im+ on my Pocket Pc and someone who wanted to communicate with me would have the choice of sending a message to either or both clients. A few jabber servers can also communicate with some of the other more popular services (AIM/MSN/etc). If I'm making any sense, then Great! and go try it out. If not, check out the jabber website, or the google blog entry for more info.

In other news, Skype has (for Windows) released version 2.0 which adds video conferencing. For those who don't know, Skype is a VoIP program which works in a P2P (peer to peer) fashion, for free. It also offers connections to landline phones for a fee. I have found it troublesome but many people have had good luck with it. Personally I prefer sip based programs (see my previous post on the subject). Note that depending on the client you use, you can do video conferencing over just about any of the sip services, though several offer it by default. In addition to those I mentioned before, a new company, Ineen is offering sip based video conferencing for free using a skinned version of eyebeam.