Google Talk uses Jabber | Tech Off

mrichman
Mark A. Richman

So I sniffed my chat session, and lo and behold, it's just Jabber. I used Ethereal and Netmon to dump out the Jabber XML.

Here is my chat session with Matt Baldwin:

<message to="baldwinmathew@gmail.com" type="chat">
  <body>Long live MSN Messenger!</body>
  <active xmlns="http://jabber.org/protocol/chatstates"/>
</message>

Has Google really gotten this lame?!

- Mark

Maurits
AKA Matthew van Eerde

Lame? What's wrong with Jabber?

Boone

Lame??? How is using a standard protocol lame??

And you didn't have to sniff anything, you could have just looked on the Google talk page to figure that out. http://www.google.com/talk/otherclients.html

Larsenal
ready to give an answer

Google talk should be understood for what it is. This beta is not that innovative. Don't let that bother you. This is no doubt just part of their ongoing tooling that will enable further innovation.

Their reasons for using a fairly accessible protocol make sense to me. What would have we said if they had developed their own Google protocol? In about 6 hours, we'd see some dev boasting that he had figured out the protocol. As with maps.google.com, you can see that Google wants its services out in the open so other devs can innovate.

symonc
symonc

Maurits wrote:
Lame? What's wrong with Jabber?

My thoughts exactly...

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

Larsenal wrote:
Google talk should be understood for what it is. This beta is not that innovative. Don't let that bother you. This is no doubt just part of their ongoing tooling that will enable further innovation

Ohhh, "innovative".

As far as I'm concerned, GoogleTalk is innovative to a point. To my knowledge, this is the first time a company has ever released a free, non-ad supported IM client that uses existing, proven, technologies.

...combined with the fact they're allowing non-GoogleTalk clients to connect to the service, I've yet to see this generosity come from the "Big 4" (MSN, AIM, YIM, ICQ)

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!

This is what they made for that $4 billion they just raised? I want my money back.

Larsenal
ready to give an answer

W3bbo wrote:

As far as I'm concerned, GoogleTalk is innovative to a point.

Agreed, but this kind of innovation is not as readily recognized outside of the geeksphere.

JChung2006

Larsenal wrote:

Agreed, but this kind of innovation is not as readily recognized outside of the geeksphere.

Calling this innovation is like calling a McDonald's hamburger gourmet cuisine. And, quite frankly, I would like fries with it.

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

Minh wrote:
This is what they made for that $4 billion they just raised? I want my money back.

I'm sure the Lamborghini and Ferrari industry felt a boost as well with their IPO Smiley

raptor3676

What I see here is yet another company getting profits out of someone else's work for free.

1. Mozilla is going to charge for advertising.
2. Linux for name usage.
3. Google gets more market data out of people's chat.

All of these move have something in common all are based on free or open source software (meaning, it costs almost nothing) and some company uses it to get huge revenues by charging for something else,

Sure! not the software of course, somebody may say. How naive they are!! I think the charging for something else and not from the software is just disguising the deal.

cravikiran
Ravi Chodavarapu

Well, I'd think that Google developed their own software for an open and standard protocol in this case. And being an open standard, I think the point is for both commercial and noncommercial entities to use it. What I would appreciate is if they released some of their code on Google Code as another library for the XMPP protocol. And to the originial author, seriously, what's lame about using an open protocol?

Tyler Brown
Bullets change governments far surer than votes.

I think that it's great that Google has ventured into the IM arena. Why? Not because they've added another IM client to the mix, but because they're simply built a client on an open protocol. This is the way I personally believe IM should be done. Competing standards don't achieve anything in the end. They divide really, forcing you into using a single, or possibly multiple clients based on which clients your friends use.

Using an open protocol will eventually result in a better experience for the end-user in the long run. Instead of having the MSN protocol, AIM protocol, etc., why not have a single protocol with multiple clients? This way each company can still implement their proprietary features if they wish, but you won't have to be forced into using a client because your friends use it.

I can see the IM scene eventually using a single protocol, and once it starts happening, and people start switching, those left behind will soon be faced with lower and lower numbers of users.

JanM
Jan

I totally agree why not use a standard protocol like Jabber/XMPP for instant messaging. And if you as a provider want to differentiate from the rest, implement your own messages. Only Jabber clients that understand your messages will be able to show them or do something else with them.

And for the fact that using Jabber/XMPP is not innovative... maybe the protocol isn't really innovative but you can certainly use to make innovative applications with it. I work for a telecommunications company that uses the Jabber/XMPP protocol for messaging in our innovative applications like AmigoTV, an iTV applications that makes it possible to do IM with your friends while wathing a TV show. And yes we also use SIP for handling the voice communication. So in the end our AmigoTV could be used to talk to your Google buddies using Google talk. So Google talk might not be innovative but the things you can hook unto can certainly be innovative from my point of view.