Google launched Google Talk today. It’s an intant messenger with voip capabilities. Google Talk is based on the xmpp protocol for text messaging. Negotiating a voice chat is also done over xmpp. All used sound codecs are documented and the voice chat negotiation will be documented too. This makes it possible for other jabber (xmpp) clients like Adium to implement the voice chat too. So in the future we will see more clients compatible with google chat for voice chat I hope.

The Google Talk help center contains pages on how to get third party clients like Adium and iChat to work with the talk.google.com server. This unfortunately doesn’t work yet, but that might be just because not all features are fully available yet.

[update] Adium on the other hand is working without any problems. I don’t know anyone with a gmail account who is using Google Talk, so if you feel like taking up some space in my contact list add me using my gmail account: joris.kluivers.