The scary rumor has come true.

According to The Verge, citing Google's director of real-time communications Nikhyl Singhal, Google has dropped XMPP altogether.

This is a very sad news and another proof of changing direction for Google, the Google that once had a slogan "Don't be evil".

This means pretty much the end of Google's IM on Maemo, MeeGo, GNU/Linux desktop, etc.

Goodbye, Google chat/Talk/Hangouts.

Source: http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/43...messaging-mess

Actually not sure about that yet... I wonder if it means their internal server dropped XMPP.

I pushed Hangout to my toy Android phone, it replaced Talk. However My Pidgin and Pre 3 both still connect just fine, and messages sent from there gets updated on Hangout, just like on Talk.

If anything the article says that there is "some level of interoperability with Talk", so I think that means this new Hangout is just Talk integrated into bits and pieces of G+ (the picture sharing and 10-person conference) into a different app.

The other big hint is that Google+ is NOT mandatory to use the Hangout app.

I don't think they would discontinue Google Talk right away.

In the presentation, they said you can 'upgrade' to Hangouts in Gmail, clicking on your profile picture. I wonder what happens with your XMPP/Jabber connection then. I don't want to try it until I find viable alternative.

I guess it is going to look like other discontinued products (Reader, old Gmail, classic e-mail editing in Gmail...) - they will support it for few more months until everyone implements their proprietary API (if they release such).

What would be the point for Google to continue supporting Talk indefinitely, when they are publicly announcing the drop of XMPP in favor of unified chat.

The Hangouts unified chat looks a lot like it's Talk under the hood, actually. At least I know without G+, Hangouts behave exactly like Talk.

If anything, if you stick with Gmail and Android only, Talk was pretty "unified". You enter some messages at one place, they show up everywhere.

Well, as they say, it is different under the hood and that's the only thing I care about.

I know how it behaves on Android and Gmail, so I don't understand where the need of abandoning XMPP comes from (other than restricting users to use their OS, just like Microsoft has been doing for ages).

I use Talk mostly on Maemo (integrated messaging) and KDE desktop (ktp in the panel - nothing beats this), only occasionaly Gmail, webOS, Android... So I'm surely gonna feel this change.

Login with a Jabber/XMPP client (like http://pidgin.im ) to the Google account and chatting with Hangouts users by this is still possible (tested last night about 1:00 am UTC).

At the moment it looks like Google stopped the Jabber/XMPP federation.
That's the feature which makes it possible to chat between Jabber.org or GMX.net and many other XMPP chat servers like GMail. And this is the most important feature, because it used to make GoogleTalk different from chat networks like ICQ, MSN, Skype or WhatsApp. With the federation feature XMPP/Jabber becomes network like the email-"network" where everybody can choose his favorite provider and nevertheless communicate with everyone else at every other provider.

I'm actually collecting some information about this issue here:
https://productforums.google.com/for...I/Lb-avo0zPwYJ

They are removing the XMPP federation server to server.

You will only be able to talk to Google users. It's still XMPP though ( kopete, pidgin... you can still use them)

Regards

what that means??

If I got the gist of this correctly, Google Talk will only work between Google users rather than also to other XMPP servers.

If you login with a Google account using a different XMPP client though, it should still work to talk to other Google accounts.

That google users can only communicate with other google users in the near future, whereas they can now communicate with every other jabber-user on other networks and services. For example, I run my own server on my own domain, and up till now it was perfectly possible to communicate with GTalk-users.

To paint the picture: it's like when from now on you can only send and receive e-mail from other GMail-users with your GMail-account. You cannot send e-mail to @outlook.com or any other e-mail service anymore.

Also note that XMPP is an open and free protocol allowing for cross-service communication, very akin to e-mail. Google, Facebook, Apple and Whatsapp all use this protocol, but don't allow cross-service communication.

Google is really going down-hill lately. The "Don't do evil"-label has been dropped long time ago, and now their services are just as vendor-locked as microsoft's, facebook's, twitter's etc.

I stay very clear of google. Not only for privacy reasons, but also for the continuity of their services.

As for XMPP, there a lot of free services available which DO support federation. jabber.org, duckduckgo.com to name two.