Celso Martinho

Update on Google Talk

Posted on Aug 24, 2005

Well it’s out and lots of question have been answered both with the availability of the service and with a minimalist Developers FAQ on the site.

In a nutshell:

  • S2S and DNS SRV records are turned off. They don’t clarify if they’re going to open them, many speculate they will. For now they ask us to send them an E-Mail asking for federation. I did and received an Automatic reply with a ticket ID.
  • When we invite a friend to GMail from our account, regardless of it’s E-Mail domain (initially I thought It would happen to .com contacts), it’s added to the XMPP roster. This is weird because they don’t have XMPP S2S open yet so I can’t IM them. But it’s the proof Gmail has a strong unified contact list engine behind the scenes.
  • There’s a group for Google Talk discussions available.
  • There’s some people asking for Asterisk’s native protocol IAX too.
  • The VoIP/SIP people is wondering if they’re going to use ENUM which would open the service further and contribute for interoperability.
  • There are rumours that iChat could do voice call to Google Talk. Not true. Hoax.
  • There’s no offline messages support. Rather than that, Google’s client uses GMail’s Webmail to send an E-Mail to your offline buddies.
  • VoIP implementation and relationship with XMPP as not yet been reverse engineered but it’s on many people’s TODO.list, including mine.
  • Just crossed my mind that if you want, you now have a very easy and well documented API to authenticate Gmail E-mail’s credentials.
  • As you would expect from using XMPP you can logon with as many clients as you want (tried two) with the same account at the same time.
  • People talked to me about Google Desktop integration but I haven’t checked.
  • File transfers and avatars are not supported by Google’s client yet, so no JEP adoption advocacy for now :)
  • Google’s client uses JEP-0115 to query/inform the other peer’s client capabilities and reports the “voice-v1″ capability.
  • Google’s client doesn’t respond to disco queries.
  • Google’s client doesn’t send or react to jabber:x:event messages.

UPDATE: There’s an interesting thread going on the JSF members list. And a reply from stpeter which I fully subscribe.