Google Talk – All talk and no play?

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.
Add a new account

Next, enter your GMail account information like this:

Enter account information

And finally, enter the server settings:

Enter server info

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 :)

Michel Jansen

Google Talk – All talk and no play?

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