#Google Talk

I just read this post about the deal that eBay and Google signed which will also allow Google Talk and Skype to interoperate and possibly be able to communicate even via chats. It them folloed by an enlightened moment (Ka ching!) where I thought of an idea that Google can use to deepen Google Talk`s penetration in the corporate environment. Google Talk is based on the solid and open standards of XMPP (Jabber). [Read More]

A while back Google added a feature to Gmail so that you can see which of your friends is online and chat with them. While this might look cool there is another side to this story, people can actually see when you are reading your Emails on your Gmail account. I, for example, use GAIM as my main IM client and since Google Talk (GTalk) uses Jabber as its underlying protocol, it means that every Jabber supported client can connect to GTalk. [Read More]

Just saw this on Digg and since I’m already on a Jabber frenzy due to my previous posts, I thought I should share. Looks quite cool, though I haven’t tried it yet. I’m using GAIM so I got everything all up in one client. I’m just waiting to get a build of GAIM that works with libjingle so I would be able to chat with my friends using Google Talk’s voice features. [Read More]

Continuing my current fixation about Jabber and Jabber related stuff (it all started with this post about how Google is openning up Google Talk to talk with other Jabber based servers), there is a good article up on O’Relly’s OnLamp.com about the pros and cons of a Company-Wide Instant Messaging solutions as well as how to setup Jabberd 2.x to do just that. It’s really worth the read for people that are trying to figure out how to utilize an IM solution in their company while still retaining a high degree of security. [Read More]

I promised in the previous post about Google Talk’s support for federation to check what open source Jabber servers supports the DialBack protocol described in RFC 3920 used by Google Talk server to talk to other Jabber server. Well… it seems that the dialback protocol is supported by all server listed here and a bunch of other non open source servers not listed there. This is a good thing, but it seems the dialback protocol is not encrypted like the other TLS and SASL server-to-server protocols. [Read More]

A while back I posted a request/hope that Google Talk will open up to AOL using one of the Jabber bridges. I also secretly hoped (meaning, I forgot to blog about it) that since Google Talk uses Jabber, they will open up its federation abilities and enable everying Google Talk user to communicate with any other Jabber user (providing that that user supports the necessary XMPP spec that Google Talk uses, which I still don’t know if it is one of the common ones, but I’ll check that up). [Read More]

I’m sure you all have heard by now that Google and AOL have signed a deal in which part of it is to enable Google Talk and AIM users to communicate with each other. Google Talk is based on the open XMPP (Jabber) standard which has built in abilities to work with gateways that enables this protocol to communicate with other protocols. I just hope Google will use some of the Jabber/AIM bridges such as AIM/ICQ-Transport to make this thing work. [Read More]

As my good friend Dudu pointed out (and I forgot to tell you), Google Talk’s log abilities are very limited. It only saves the last 20 lines of chat (and only if the window was closed properly, otherwise it will NOT save the log). Since Google Talk currently lack any normal API (heck, its just one executable file ;-) ), I thought about writing a small up that would listen to file changes in the log directory, parse them and accumelate them in one file per converstaion with a person (similar to what the log is doing now). [Read More]

After discovering the Google Talk Chat Log format and seeing that its not human readable, I’ve decided to write a log viewer so I can check out and read my logs whenever I want to.

You can download the Google Talk Chat Log Viewer v0.1 from here .

I’ve also written there the Google Talk Chat Log format if anyone else is interested.

Enjoy!

Google Talk stored all of your custom messages that you have entered in a file in your user profile directory. The file is located at “%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Talk\status” Inside you will find a file named in the format [userid]-history.txt. So if your Gmail account is John.Dow@gmail.com the filename will be john.dow_gmail.com-history.txt (besides, there is usually only one file there anyway ;-) ). The file format is very easy. It start with a first line which has the character “1” in it. [Read More]