With a lot of fuss, Google announced a new service: Google Talk. A quick look on the supported clients page, showed nothing spectacular: voice chats are only possible with Google’s own client, which is unfortunately only supported on Microsoft’s Windows platform.
The system used for instant messaging, however, is just plain old Jabber, which means it’s open and free, and the number of supported clients on all platforms is far greater than the list Google keeps.
Let me show you how to get it to work on my favorite client: Adium X.
First, launch Adium X, go to it’s preferences window and select the “Accounts” tab. Click the little “+” at the bottom left, and select “Jabber” from the list of supported protocols.
Next, enter your GMail account information like this:
And finally, enter the server settings:
Yes, that’s right. It’s that simple. Just connect an arbitrary Jabber client to talk.google.com on the default port, and have fun!
I’m really getting curious what Google Talk uses for audio communication. For now, Skype is the only client with decent Mac support, so I’ll stick to that :)
Initially, it didn’t worked here (Read Error), but when I changed the port to 5222, it worked. Strange…
That appears to have something to do with SSL/TLS negotiation.
Port 5223 expects TLS communication to start with, while port 5222 is unencrypted at first, and will start using TLS with the STARTTLS command or something like that :)