I’m a little behind the times in blogging about this, but I needed to actually have a blog first. Rumors have been flying for a while that Google was planning to release its own IM service, and now Google Talk is here. It is based on the Jabber XMPP protocol, but it isn’t yet linked into the Jabber server network.
You won’t find any fancy features in the minimalist client program, but that can sometimes be a good thing as it seems to use far fewer system resources than most other clients. If you want a more feature-rich client, you should be able to connect with any client that supports Jabber. You’ll also need to use a different client if you are not running on Windows, because the Google Talk client is currently a Windows-only application.
Currently, you can only chat with other Google Talk users, although Google promises that they are committed to interoperability. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any friends that are on Google Talk yet, so I can’t give it a thorough test in daily use.