GoogleTalk goes live-ish

Yesterday, it seems the rumour that Google could be working on an IM client has been confimed not to be a rumour at all. Introducing GoogleTalk!

The service runs on Jabber and has its own server. Google is offering its own IM client, called GoogleTalk, as well as lots of instructions for connecting to GoogleTalk with other IM clients. Note that some of the links on the aforementioned URL are dead, as well as the 'don't see your IM client here? tell us about it' link.

Since using GoogleTalk, Jabber or GAIM is, of course, too easy for me, I decided to be lazy and use my fav IM client Miranda to connect to it. A Jabber plugin for this client is included within the default install, so I figured no problem.

A bit of tweaking, cursing and searching later I have found the following instructions work:

• Username: Gmail username, without @gmail.com
  
• Password: your Gmail password
  
• Login server: gmail.com (this is not a login server, but just the domain of your email address)
  
• Check 'Manually specify connection host'
  
• Host: talk.google.com
  
• Post: 5223 (not 5222!)

Since a picture says more than a 1000 words (and the above is a bit short of that), click below to see a pic of the setup:



Note that searching for users (with their Gmail username, no @gmail.com) always seems to return a hit, even if you search for one that does not exist.