Use Google talk to chat with Yahoo! and MSN buddies.


With loads of buddies all over the planet, all of us have been forced to use either multiple messengers or unified clients like Pidgin to keep in touch with everyone. However, with the introduction of Google Talk, and its subsequent jump in popularity. you can chat using Google Talk right from your browser, when you access your GMail account.

Now google Talk users can chat with their yahoo and MSN and icq buddies by using a simple software. It is called as PSI. It 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.

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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. 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.

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.

To get online, just right-click on your account name in the main window, go to status Online.Now right click on the account name again and click Service Discovery.
You now need to find a Jabber transport server that will help communicate between Google Talk and non-Google Talk 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.

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You will see a list of transport services being populated in the box below. 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. 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 Google Talk client. To confirm this, open  Google Talk and you will find all the contacts from the other service inside Google Talk 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. There have been reported cases of
unreliability of quite a few transport servers, but we found that two mentioned above are quite stable. You should also know that when you use a transport client, you trust your information to a third party server, which you may not like if you are very particular
about your privacy.

Filed under: Google

June 25, 2008 by: Prasanth Chandra

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