Google Talk and XMPP

Gary Burd of Google announced today at the Talkabout blog that Google Talk is now federated with the world-wide XMPP public network [pointer from Om Malik]

[from Google Talkabout: XMPP Federation]

I flipped the switch to connect the Google Talk Service to the public XMPP network this morning. Google Talk users can now chat with users on other XMPP services and vice versa.

I asked Peter Saint-Andre of the Jabber Foundation what this means:

It means that Google Talk is now yet another server on the Jabber
network. In plain English: you can now chat with your Google Talk
friends from your account on any other Jabber server. The kind of open
communication we’ve had in the email world since 1993 or so, except
without the spam.

I am still awaiting the interoperability of Gizmo with Google Talk, which has been supposedly in the works for a long time.