Google Talk now does Offline IM (kind of)
[Update: Sometime after posting this, offline messaging support seems to have disappeared. Hopefully it will come back some day.]
With the announcement that Google Talk is now integrated with Gmail, I decided to test how exactly it works.
The chat history is recorded by the Google Talk server (if you enable it). This means that you can use any Jabber client—including iChat—and your Google Talk Chat Logs will be stored in your Gmail account. Very cool!
I also tested Offline IM (my biggest complaint with Google Talk thusfar). The Google Talk Jabber server no longer whines at me when I send an offline IM! Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the messages sent while a Google Talk user is offline end up in the Gmail Chat Logs, but do not appear to the user when they next log in. It may very well act differently when using the official Google Talk client, but this is not very good news for users of regular Jabber clients.
To reiterate: Offline IM works, but the messages sent while the Google Talk user is offline only end up in the Chat Logs and do not appear when you next log in with a regular client. This could very well be a bug that is soon fixed, though, given that they do seem to partially support Offline IM now, and that the service has not been completely rolled out yet.
These new developments are very nice, and I hope Google Talk continues to press forward. Good news for Jabber users everywhere.
Julian -
Any idea how Google is providing the on-line Jabber connectivity out of the Gmail client?
Are they using JEP-124?
Cheers,
- Bill
That functionality isn’t available to me yet; no idea.
My guess is that if it’s not JEP-124 then the Jabber community will immediately whole-heartedly embrace it no matter what it is, since it’s from Google.
The most annoying bug of the Google Talk client is this message I get from a Google Talk user everytime she sends a message to me:
iChatAgent[237] WARNING: JabberMessageNode: ignoring unknown child
My console.log is full of these messages.
I finally got chat for my account and I’ve been using it all week.. sometimes just in the browser and sometimes in GAIM. I really like the browser client now that I’ve installed this[1] Greasemonkey script.
[1] http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=102
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