Today, Google opened Google Talk, their instant messaging and VoIP infrastructure/tool based on XMPP, the protocol of Jabber, to the public! This means, that every user of the Jabber network can now send instant messages to users of Google Talk and vice versa. Since I am a Jabber user, hosting my own Jabber server at rusi.is-a-geek.org, my server now directly communicates with the Google servers for full interworking. If you use Google Talk, I’d be happy if you send me an instant message to jabber@rusi.is-a-geek.org – I really wanna find out, if it works.
But that’s just one part of the story. This news also means that, with an appropriate already in-progress plugin for my Jabber server and yet to come VoIP clients using libjingle we’ll get a completely free, open (as opposed to Skype), easy to use (as opposed to SIP) self-hostable fully distributed VoIP infrastructure (well, where Google charges for calls to plain old telephones – let’s just kick out those!).
[tags]google, talk, open, jabber, xmpp, libjingle, skype, sip[/tags]