Wow! Google has really gotten behind open standards -- and Jabber/XMPP in particular -- with today's release of Google Talk! In case you haven't heard, Google Talk is the instant messaging (IM) and voice over IP (VoIP) service announced today by Google. It uses the standard XMPP protocol that emerged from the Jabber community, so many Jabber clients should "just work" with Google Talk (at least the IM parts). Check out their Developer FAQ for more information. They haven't turned on "server-to-server" functionality yet, so Google Talk is not yet part of the open Jabber/XMPP network, but Google has committed to interoperability through federation with other XMPP servers once they figure out the best way to make that happen in a secure fashion. With the release of Google Talk, Google joins Apple, BellSouth, FedEx, EDS, France Telecom, HP, Oracle, Orange, Portugal Telecom, Sun, most of the Wall Street investment banks, numerous U.S. Government agencies, and countless other organizations in developing and deploying Jabber-based technologies. Welcome to the club, Google! :-)
Speaking of Google, the Jabber/XMPP community is participating in Google's Summer of Code program, which enables university students from around the world to earn money while working on open-source projects. There are a number of Jabber-related projects:
The intent is to introduce students to open-source software development, and my impression so far is that the project has certainly succeeded in that goal.
Google Talk and the Summer of Code are big, but the Jabber/XMPP community has been busy, too. For example, the Gizmo Project is adding Jabber support to its voice over IP client (which is slated to interoperate with Google Talk in the near future). It seems that the Hula project (an open-source email and calendaring server) may be adding Jabber notifications. The ServiceMix enterprise service bus sends notifications via Jabber. The Silk Project is looking for contributors to add IM and groupchat support to their open-source content management system. loglibrary enables you to log IRC channels and Jabber groupchat rooms (though we have native support for room logging in JEP-0045 and mu-conference). More and more people are recognizing the usefulness of the XMPP publish-subscribe extension for things like OPML editors and Atom-over-XMPP for real-time content syndication. There are active user communities in Poland, France, and now Brazil. And this summer has also witnessed updated releases from Jabber-related projects such as Jive Messenger, tweeze, ejabberd, neos, jabberd2, NewtonIM, Wooden Fish Messenger, Fljud, JWChat, Jeti, Gaim, mcabber, Akeni, Gajim, GOIM (a client for gamers), Tkabber, XIFFIAN, and The Coccinella -- heck, someone has even written a little Jabber client that runs in Microsoft Excel!
Getting back to Google, in the last few days a lot of people have asked me what a Google IM service would mean for interoperability. The short-term approach to interoperability in the Jabber community has been to deploy gateways that reverse-engineer the closed protocols used by AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger. There are many such gateways on the Jabber/XMPP network, but this is not the right way to bring about interoperability for the long term (it's as if you had needed gateways back in 1993 to send email to your friends using CompuServe or Prodigy, whereas what was really needed was a single protocol for email, which emerged in the form of SMTP). The long-term approach has been to work toward ever-wider adoption of Jabber technologies so that the consumer IM services will want to open up true server-to-server communications with the Jabber network using the core Jabber/XMPP protocols as standardized last year in RFC 3920 and RFC 3921 by the Internet Engineering Task Force (the main standards body for the Internet). At that point XMPP will become the lingua franca for IM, just as SMTP is the lingua franca for email. I think we are seeing signs that this strategy is beginning to pay off.
Jabber on!
--stpeter