Google Talkabout: Jingle All The Way

This explains what the Google Talk team has been doing.... and here I thought they were just goofing off the last few months. (I'm kidding, of course.)

Today, two major advances have been made in the openness of our voice capabilities. This morning, the Jabber Software Foundation (JSF) introduced two new proposed extensions to XMPP, known as Jingle and Jingle Audio. These enhancements describe how to write software compatable with Google Talk's voice features and have been introduced into the JSF's standards process where they'll be reviewed and improved by the XMPP community. To make implementing these extensions even easier, we've released a library we call "libjingle."Libjingle is the very same code Google Talk uses to negotiate, establish, and maintain peer-to-peer voice sessions, packaged as a library for other developers to use in their own projects. By incorporating Libjingle into your project, you enable its users to voice chat with other users of the Google Talk service.

The future of voice communications is looking brighter and cheaper for us consumers, though there's a big battle still to get through with the major telcos. My advice to them? Figure out NOW how to get on board, cut your losses while you can.

Read more at googletalk.blogspot.com...