NOTE: Most of the issues pointed out in this post have been addressed and corrected. Thus, this post remains available for historical reasons.

I don't want to seem unappreciative, so I'll start out with some good points. Google Talk has energized Jabber/XMPP to a level of activity that is unprecedented. Think about all of the things that have happened since Google Talk went beta: how much of it is a direct or indirect result of Google choosing to use XMPP as the protocol for their IM service? I don't want to minimize this point. Google Talk has been one of the best things to happen to the Jabber community in recent memory. And kudos to them.

Ever since Google Talk flipped the switch to enable server-to-server communications, Google Talk has become my default recommendation for anyone looking to get a ‘jabber account’. Back then, jabber.org was still having stability problems (as it was still running jabberd 1.4), and my own server was also less than reliable. Google Talk also came with several useful features, such as the chat client built right into gmail.

However, I have recently realized that Google Talk is not the ideal, stable jabber server that I thought it would be. Read on to find out why.

UPDATE: (2006-11-01) Google Talk now supports offline message delivery!

I just noticed yesterday that Google Talk now seems to support vCard avatars! Apparently, they support pretty much nothing else about vcard-temp... but hey, at least I no longer have to keep explaining to my friends why their avatars don't work with their gmail accounts.

Just a reminder to everyone: I'll be dropping my accounts on AIM, MSN, ICQ, and YIM on May 19^th of this year, and switching entirely to Jabber. So grab yourself a gmail account if you don't already have a jabber account!

It would appear that Google Talk has has not only begun testing Server-to-Server communication with the google.com domain, but also enabled S2S communication for gmail.com! This should be the major turning point for Jabber adoption. It's time to take over the world.

UPDATE: Official Announcement | Official Discussion Forum