Google announced that their Talk service is supporting the industry standard XMPP protocol (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) now. The announce has been made public in the Google Official Blog by Mike Jazayeri, the Product Manager of GoogleTalk. What does this mean? Well, it means that anyone who has an IM service provider that supports XMPP can talk with GoogleTalk users and vis-versa. This is great! May be we are getting closer to the day where the IM service will be like the phone service. No matter who you have and who your friends have as provider, you can always talk to each other.

Related Links:
- http://googleblog.blogspot.com
- http://www.google.com/talk/developer.html#service