Jabber Australia

Media Release
24/08/2005

Google joins Apple as another major Jabber adopter

Jabber Australia has welcomed the news that Google is using Jabber/XMPP for its Google Talk instant messaging service.

"This move has great potential for encouraging the use of open standards in instant messaging", said Jeremy Lunn, President of Jabber Australia.

"Instant messaging users have had enough of the fragmented mess that existing networks have created", Mr Lunn added. "You might be using Yahoo! Messenger and want to talk to a friend on MSN, it's simply not possible. Yet imagine if the same were true of telephones, if you were using Optus and you have friends using Telstra, imagine if you couldn't call them. People would be quite outraged."

Mr Lunn believes that Google's move is a step in the right direction and could make quite a difference in the long run. "The use of open standards is always a good thing, especially in a case like this when interoperability has long been lacking", he said.

The service can be used with any existing Jabber client, including Psi, Pandion, Trillian Pro and even iChat (that as of the latest Mac OS X release comes with Jabber support).

However, Mr Lunn warns that it's not yet clear how Google's IM offering will interoperate with other Jabber servers. "It would be quite a concern if Google failed to allow messaging between the existing network of Jabber servers and their own Jabber service. This would make Google an isolated island where you can't talk with anyone else using other Jabber servere."

Hopes remain high though, as a section of the Google Talk website outlines the advantages of "service choice". Included in the same page is an email address for other service providers to contact Google about opening up compatibility with Google Talk. Mr Lunn said that he has sent an email to the address to try and ensure that users of the Jabber Australia will be able to talk to friends using Google Talk.

"However, we hope that Google will open up interoperability with all existing Jabber servers. It would be a bit much if Google tried to control who can talk to who", he said. "There are too many existing Jabber servers out there for Google to allow each one independently and this would provide too much scope for small providers to be left out", Mr Lunn concluded.

About Jabber Australia

Jabber Australia is a non-profit organization set up in mid-2003 to advocate the use of open instant messaging in Australia and to provide a portal for people to obtain easy access to Jabber. The service offers the ability to talk to existing friends on MSN Messenger, ICQ and Yahoo! provided that they have an account for these networks. Access through each of these networks is through a gateway known as a transport.

Jabber Australia now has almost 1500 active users and is proving extremely popular with Mac users since iChat in Mac OS X Tiger has Jabber support. The service is hosted on a dedicated server kindly provided by Ilisys Web Hosting, Perth.

Jabber/XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) is an Internet standard for instant messaging in use by thousands of servers and millions of people around the world.

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