Google Talk federation….
When Google Talk first came out, many people were excited that they were using the protocol that jabber is built on. There were also disappointments that ALL of the protocol hadn’t been implemented. In fact, the biggest disappointment many had was that a jabber.org instant messenger user could not IM with a gmail.com user. That has all changed…. Google Talk now does “open federation” which basically means IM requests can be passed along from one server to another until it get’s to the server that the IM user is registered with.
To put it simply, think about email. Email messages work their way around the internet to the correct recipient in a “federated system.”
The googleblog, google talk blog, customize talk, all have posts about it. Also, there’s some information for developers at at the talk/developers page.
Hopefully this will be the beginning of a somewhat less fragmented IM landscape. Sure, different IM clients might offer various features, but there should be a unifying understanding amongst all of them such that a yahoo IM user could communicate with an MSN IM user and a google talk user simultaneously. (Of course, today you’d have to have a messenger supporting the different protocols or severl IM programs running to do the same.) Maybe in coming years IM will start working together.