YAIMC (Yet Another IM Client)

Approximately 1 week ago, Google entered the instant-messaging conglomerate by releasing Google Talk. If you are like me, you also sighed and said "Jeez, not another IM client". Since there are already so many clients competing for supremacy in the IM market, what is it going to take to tip the scales in Google's direction. Better put, what will Google have that the others do not?

The answer is that Google Talk is built on Jabber, an open-source IM protocol, whereas competitors AOL, Yahoo!, ICQ, and MSN use proprietary protocols. In other words, each and every one of these clients are incompatible with one another with one notable exception: AOL-IM and ICQ are now virtually cross-compatible, but that wasn't always the case.

Apple Xnet published a great article discussing what Jabber is, and why it is so important to the instant-messaging community. Consider email for a moment. If you want to send someone a message, all you do is locate their email address and write them a message. It doesn't matter what email client they use, nor does it matter what kind of mail server is on their end; they get a message from you exactly the way it was intended.

You cannot do that with IM clients -- at least today.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if all you needed was one IM client where you could add all your buddies, and chat with them all through one program? Sure, there are IM clients that support numerous protocols -- I personally use Adium, but I still need to have accounts with every protocol.

With Jabber, anyone can write a client and design it with any features they like, and it will be compatible with all other Jabber-supported clients. This is the ticket that Google needs to blow the competition out of the water.

Apple's iChat, which I consider to have the best interface of any IM client, already supports Jabber. I would use iChat exclusively, except that it does not support the Yahoo! or the MSN protocols.

If you have a Gmail account, you are already signed up with Google Talk. It's still a beta release, so I understand it's a little buggy, and it doesn't have many features, but I am sure that it will change in the future.

Check Google Talk out, and see what the buzz is all about.