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As expected, http://talk.google.com/ went live yesterday night, and they have tweaked the login process slightly, so that you use your normal gmail.com e-mail address as your JID as well. However, you still have to use talk.google.com to connect to (this may be sore spot for anyone still using a jabber client stupid enough not to let you separate JID from the connect server — and there are still a few).

Needless to say, Google’s adoption should be a huge shot in the arm for XMPP, which otherwise has been suffering years and years of rather tortuously languid development. Their use of XMPP raises a few questions specific to XMPP/Jabber as well as the IM industry in general:

• Will talk.google.com have any MUC-capable group conference support?
• Will they add offline messaging? (This is a huge feature of Jabber — that you can send messages to offline users stored server-side, but google’s server appears not to have this.)
• Will they ever enable any s2s (server to server) communication so that talk.google.com users can communication with people on other jabber servers? (like jabber.centresource.com and quietlife.net).
• Is this a nail in the coffin of the hopes of SIP/SIMPLE (a technology Microsoft and others have been investing in) to become the open IM standard?

There’s more discussion on the Planet Jabber site.