Jabber, Jingle, Google and Gaim

It sounds like Christmas comes in the form of Jabber-based voice chat. Called Jingle (as in "I'll give you a jingle" and not "Jingle Bells"), this experimental spec defines methods for extending XMPP clients such as Google Talk and Gaim to support voice over IP (VoIP) and other peer-to-peer multimedia sessions.

Why is an experimental, draft spec important? Because it has the substantial heft of Google supporting it. As we reported earlier, Sean Egan, one of the lead developers on the open-source Gaim Jabber client joined Google earlier this year. Egan has been working specifically on extending Google Talk's voice capabilities to provide interoperability with other clients (most notably, Gaim, of course). Google Talk itself is a Jabber client, although Google hasn't yet opened their server to allow connectivity with other Jabber servers.

Google has already released an open-source library of components that let programmers develop interoperability with Google Talk's peer-to-peer and VoIP capabilities. Called Libjingle, it's available now on Sourceforge, and includes source code for Google's implementation of Jingle and Jingle-Audio.

Meanwhile, a beta release of Gaim 2.0 with support for voice interoperability with Google Talk and video with both MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger is expected later today.