WOW! so, <ahref="http://thousandrobots.com/blog/archives/2005/08/using_googles_n.php">it's true</a>! there have been various rumblings <ahref="http://gigaom.com/2005/08/22/here-comes-google-voice/">around</a> the <ahref="http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/23/1313229&tid=217"id="05/08/23/1313229&tid=217">web</a>, but I just in fact was able to log on to talk.google.com using my gmail account info via <ahref="http://www.adiumx.com"title="Adiumx - OSX IM client">adium</a>.
what am i talking about? well, for those of you who don't know, the <ahref="http://www.jabber.org/">jabber project</a> 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 <ahref="http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/ichat/">ichat av</a> 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?)
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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 <ahref="http://drupal.org"title="drupal content management platform">drupal</a> and <ahref="http://www.bmannconsulting.com/node/1538">yes, boris</a> 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 <ahref="http://www.saint-andre.com/blog/">peter saint-andre</a> and <ahref="http://dizzyd.com/blog/">dave "dizzyd" smith</a>) who were interested in drupal albeit for other reasons, hopefully more on that later.</p><p>
looks like these "open standards", "free software" folks might be on to something...
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<strong>UPDATE:</strong> and <ahref="http://www.google.com/talk/">the google talk site</a> is now live. very cool