Summary

  • In August 2005 Google Talk accepted several independent XMPP clients, while Google described server federation as work under way.
  • In January 2006 Google announced open federation. Gmail chat joined as another XMPP client in February. Two kinds of openness had different launch dates and different gatekeepers.

The client door opened first

On 24 August 2005, Google launched Google Talk in beta for Gmail users. The company said its service spoke XMPP, so a user could sign in through iChat, GAIM, Trillian, Adium or Psi instead of Google's own program. That was a real choice: a developer outside Google could write the interface, while Google still ran the account's service.

The same announcement called client openness a start. Google said it wanted servers to federate and had begun working with EarthLink and Sipphone. An independent client and an independent service provider are different things. A Psi user with a Google account still needed Google's server; a user with an account at another XMPP service needed a working route between servers. The launch post put that second route in the future tense.

January moved the boundary

In a 17 January 2006 announcement, Google said open federation for Google Talk was available. Product manager Mike Jazayeri used email and the telephone network as analogies: a person should be able to choose a provider and still reach someone who chose another. Google said companies, universities and corporations were participating, and described reach to millions of users. Those are Google's claims from the announcement, not a measured census of successful conversations.

The distinction matters because a protocol alone cannot force a provider to pass messages across its boundary. In August, the choice was which application to use at Google's door. In January, the choice expanded to which service could hold an account. The provider still had to operate the connection; the existence of XMPP gave the parties a common language for doing it.

Gmail became another room, not another network

On 7 February 2006, Gmail engineer Jon Perlow described chat inside the mailbox: presence on the contact list, conversations in the browser, and histories that users could save and search like mail. He called Gmail another XMPP client connected to the Google Talk network and said Gmail users could reach Google Talk and Jabber users. The announcement shows how one company could add a new front door while the inter-provider door already stood open.

This short sequence is the useful Internet history. On launch day Google could truthfully say its service used an open protocol and welcomed outside software. That did not give a user a choice of messaging provider. The second choice arrived as an operating arrangement, announced in January, and Gmail then made that arrangement visible inside an everyday inbox.