Use GoogleTalk To Chat With Yahoo! And MSN Buddies

Recently, GoogleTalk opened up their chat protocol to Jabber networks, which now makes it possible for GoogleTalk users to chat with their buddies on AIM, MSN, Yahoo and ICQ. Here is how it can be achieved.

The resources required for this are Psi— a free Jabber client, which can be downloaded from http://psi-im.org, and GoogleTalk, which can be downloaded from http://talk.google.com. Install these two chat clients and proceed to the next step.

 Select Account Setup in Psi 

Launch Psi and in the “Add Account” window (which will launch if you are using Psi for the first time), enter Google Talk as the Name and do not check the box next to Register new account.

Add your Google Talk account

Click Add. Alternatively if you have already been using Psi, you can right-click on the Psi icon in the System Tray, go to Psi and select Account Setup. The Account Properties window will show up and here you should enter your full Gmail address including “@gmail.com” into the Jabber ID field. Tick the “Automatically connect on Startup” and “Automatically reconnect if disconnected” boxes.

Google Talk Account setup properties

Click on the Connection tab. Check Use SSL encryption (to server). The Port field will automatically change to 5223, which is normal. Check the “Ignore SSL warnings”, “Allow Plaintext Login”, “Send Keep-alive packets (for NAT timeouts)” and “Manually Specify Server Host/Port:” boxes. Enter “talk.google.com” in the Host field and leave the port as 5223. If you have trouble connecting, use port 443 instead.

Connection properties

To get online, just right-click on your account name in the main window, go to Status > Online. Now rightclick on the account name again and click Service Discovery.

You now need to find a Jabber transport server that will help communicate between GoogleTalk and non-GoogleTalk chat applications. A good place to start this search is The XMPP Federation at https://www.xmpp.net/ servers and Open Jabber Servers at http://www.jabber.org/user/publicservers. shtml. We used the server jwchat.org (or you can use talkonaut.com), since it had transport servers for AIM, ICQ, Yahoo as well as MSN. Enter this name into the Address field (initially containing the name gmail.com) and click on Browse. You will see a list of transport servers being populated in the box below.

Subscribe to RemoteCalendars

To set up your IM account, right-click on one of these servers and select Register. Enter your user name and password for the service selected and click Register. Psi will ask you to confirm all of your newly transported contacts in your Google Talk account.

Register other IM services as well

After this is done, they’ll all be automatically available through your Google Talk account. You will even be able to add buddies from that service, right from your GoogleTalk client. To confirm this, open GoogleTalk and you will find all the contacts from the other service inside GoogleTalk buddies list. To add a friend from another service, just make sure that you follow the format screenname@transport_ server_name.dns_name—if the Yahoo ID of your buddy is testacc@ yahoo.com, and jwchat.org is the transport server, you should add the contact from within GoogleTalk as testacc@yahoo.jwchat.org.

Category: Google, Instant Messenger, Tutorial