Google opens their IM
For those of you already enjoying GoogleTalk, they’ve announced that they’ve opened their service to federation. As they say, “Service providers just need to support the XMPP standard for server-to-server federation and their users will be able to talk to our users (and vice versa).”
Note that this is different from the AOL Instant Messaging (AIM) paradigm where service providers must pay AOL a fee to federate. Like many of us, Google is advocating what they call “service choice” — the idea that IM should work like email or your phone.
Go figure.