talk.google.com

WOW! so, it's true! there have been various rumblings around the web, but I just in fact was able to log on to talk.google.com using my gmail account info via adium.

what am i talking about? well, for those of you who don't know, the jabber project has been around for several years offering an *open* protocol for instant messaging (amongst other things). i've followed the project for quite a few years now - pretty sure that it was something special. not to take anything away from apple - who's ichat av supports jabber natively as of tiger - but i have a feeling that google's adoption may well be the biggest thing to happen for "consumer jabber". the best part (from my early stance) is that it's actually open, "true" jabber, i can connect with my standard drupal client - no vendor lock-in (although we can presume that google will distribute their own client, no?)

it's all coming at a pretty interesting time since i've been doing a fair bit of tinkering with jabber again lately (yes, it involved drupal and yes, boris i will release it real soon now). what's more, while in Portland (for OSCON) i actually got to meet two of the "big names" from the jabber foundation (namely peter saint-andre and dave "dizzyd" smith) who were interested in drupal albeit for other reasons, hopefully more on that later.

looks like these "open standards", "free software" folks might be on to something...

UPDATE: and the google talk site is now live. very cool