What is talk.google.com?

It seems like thousands of people are sitting on the edge of their chairs waiting for news of Google's widely anticipated announcement of Instant Messaging support. Many seem convinced that Google will be supporting Jabber/XMPP. Evidence of an XMPP server has even been found on one of Google's servers. [In fact, I've managed to log in myself and send a few messages. It's clear that Google is still working through some issues. For instance, I got the following message while digging around: "(23:14:04) gmail.com: The broken link has been fixed. Thanks for being our first users!"] While it's working, it still isn't "announced."

Of course, if you really want to be one of the first to hear what Google will announce, the easiest thing to do is to simply create a PubSub subscription and we'll let you know the instant someone mentions the announcement in their blog. We'll even use Jabber/XMPP to send you the news! Some folk are already doing this. For instance you can find a reasonably good PubSub subscription on the "SincereTheory" blog. The author of that blog proposes the following:

"google" AND ("instant messaging" OR "instant messenger" OR "google talk" OR "googletalk")

That subscription should do the job fairly well. However, in my personal subscription, I'm also tracking any mention of the node "talk.google.com" either in the text or in a link (URI) contained in a message. I'm also interested in Jabber and/or XMPP whenever mentioned in the same post as the word "Google." Thus, I'm using the following:

("google" AND ("instant messaging" OR "instant messenger" OR Jabber or XMPP)) OR "google talk" OR "googletalk" OR talk.google.com OR URI:talk.google.com

My subscription may be a bit of overkill, but it seems to give me useful results. If you have what you consider to be a better subscription, why don't you include it in a comment to this post? In any case, I know I'll be one of the first to hear the news since I've got a PubSub subscription listening for it and my subscription results are pushed, the instant they are matched, to my PubSub Sidebar -- which is, of course, driven by the Jabber/XMPP protocol!

bob wyman

Comments

[Michael Arrington]

Bob, I agree this would work perfectly, except my damn RSS reader takes forever to update and so the instantaneous aspect of it is completely useless. :-(

You should set up IM notifications.
[Bob Wyman Responds:
We do have IM notifications! We have been supporting the Jabber/XMPP protocol for years now. If you have a Jabber/XMPP client that supports the "JEP-0060 PubSub" extensions you'll be able to get notifications from us today. Otherwise, use one of the PubSub Sidebars that are on our dowloads page. These use Jabber/XMPP for instant notifications.
]

[mESH]

Thanks for the plug! Your query is astonishing. I just started getting serious with PubSub within the last few weeks. Months actually. Now that LiveJournal supports tagging, my old Technorati queries have rotted.

TechnoJournal

Your query helps me deepen my understanding of PubSub and for that I thank you.