Google has announced open federation for Google Talk. Open Federation makes it possible for consumers to choose one service provider and use that account to chat with people on any other federated service.


Google has announced open federation for Google Talk. Open Federation makes it possible for consumers to choose one service provider and use that account to chat with people on any other federated service.

Mike Jazayeri, Google Talk Product Manager, has explained this in the official Google Blog: “For example, email is a federated system. You might have a .edu address and I have a Gmail address, but you and I can still exchange email. The same for the phone: there’s nothing that prevents Cingular users from talking to Sprint users”.

He has said that this is not the case for chatting. With each service provider consumers have to open an account. But with open federation this has changed. “With open federation, you get to choose your service provider and you can talk to people on any other federated service (and vice versa)”. [source]

Just as it is possible to talk on phone with people who use the services of different companies, Google Talk network will make it possible to chat with those who do not use Google Talk.

According to Google this will allow the consumers to choose the service provider based on other more important factors, “such as features, quality of service, and price” and at the same time they can talk to anyone they want.

Google currently supports open federation with “any service provider that supports the industry standard XMPP protocol. This includes Earthlink, Gizmo Project, Tiscali, Netease, Chikka, MediaRing, and thousands of other ISPs, universities, corporations and individual users”. [source]

If you are building your own Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, XMPP, and need more information, click here.

If you are using a commercial or open-source jabber server such as ejabberd, click here.

 

 

 

 

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