meta title="GoogleTalk isn't Jabber" meta date="2007-12-17T23:39:00Z"

So, everybody's been singing the praises of Google for using an open standard, XMPP (also known as Jabber), for its Google Talk service. Open standards are, undeniably a good thing. When they're conformed to, that is.

I, as a Jabber user but not a Google Talk user, can talk to most Google Talk users just fine. Their JIDs (Jabber IDs) are something like username@googlemail.com or username@gmail.com; when you connect to them, your non-Google Jabber server looks for googlemail.com or gmail.com and gets redirected to the right place.

The fun comes when somebody is using Google Tools (or whatever it's called) to provide Google services from their own domain; their JID will be username@example.com. However, example.com isn't a Jabber server. My suspicion is that the Google Jabber servers know that example.com is a Google Tools domain and redirect to themselves. However, no other Jabber servers have any way of knowing what server to use instead of example.com---the whole point of a JID is that it tells you what server to use for a given user, and there's no other way of specifying.

Well done, Google. You win again.

jabber rants