Information Technology Knowledge Base

GTalk, Google’s instant messaging client, uses the Jabber network protocol (also known as XMPP). Now although GTalk doesn’t expose it in its user interface, Jabber has a concept of transports that let you communicate with users on non-Jabber instant messaging networks. Using the small trick detailed below, it is possible to get these transports working in GTalk.

Adding Transports to your GTalk Account

First you need to set up GTalk to acknowledge other, non-Jabber/XMPP instant messaging networks. As this is not possible using the official GTalk client, you will need to install a more featureful Jabber client program. Pick any client that will work on your platform. For a list of Jabber clients and instructions on how to log into GTalk, see this page. (A comprehensive list of Jabber clients can be found here, but doesn’t come with instructions specific to GTalk.) Once installed you will need to start the program and log in to your GTalk account. After having logged in, only two more steps for registering a transport remain:

1. Find a public Jabber/XMPP transport for the network you want to connect to. Try googling for it or use the popular jabber.anywise.com;
2. Add this transport to your GTalk account.

Once you have decided on a transport to use, you’ll need to bring up your Jabber client’s Service Discovery dialog. If you don’t know where it is, look around in the menus a bit. In the Service Discovery dialog enter the name of the Jabber server that has the transport you need.

Next register the transport you need. You should be prompted for your username and password. You will need to enter a username and password for the instant messaging network you want to connect to. I.e., if you wish to install an MSN transport, you will need to enter the username and password you normally use to connect to MSN. If you don’t have an account yet, create one now using the standard procedure for the instant messaging network you want to connect to (if you need an account for MSN, check passport.net).

Once you have registered your transport, subscription requests may pop up for the people on your MSN/ICQ/AIM/Yahoo contact list. Approve these.

Adding MSN/ICQ/AIM/Yahoo Buddies to your GTalk Contact List

Once you have registered a relevant transport, you can add users from other instant messaging networks to your contact list. One way to go about that is to add them via the Jabber client that you installed. This client should allow you to select the transport or protocol through which the user can be reached.

Alternatively you can add a friend to your contact list from GTalk (even using the web based GTalk in GMail). To do this add “username@transport” to your contact list, where username is the name of the user on whatever network he is using, and where transport is the name of the transport to contact him through. For instance, if you’re using the jabber.anywise.com MSN transport, you’ll want to enter “msn.jabber.anywise.com” for transport. To find out the name of a transport, look at other users on your contact list that use the same instant messaging network. The part of after the “@” in their GTalk username, is the name of the transport. If you don’t have any such people on your contact list, you might also look for the transport name in your contact list, although it might be burried beneath a Show All link (this is the case in the web based GTalk as of August 2006). Sometimes it will also be necessary to mangle usernames a bit when adding them. Thus it may happen that to add MSN user “jdv@foobar.be”, you have to tell GTalk to add “jdv%foobar.be@msn.jabber.anywise.com”. Take a peak at the other users’ GTalk usernames for finding your way around such obstacles.