You should be able to get it to work using any Jabber client. I’ve been trying to get it to work on Trillian, but I’ve been having some trouble. I’ve set my username as [my gmail id]@gmail.com and the server as talk.google.com. Trillian authenticates, but then quits after receiving “iq errors”:

[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:04:55] *** Creating connection "[my gmail id]@gmail.com/"
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:04:56] *** Server supports TLS encryption...
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:04:56] *** Negotiating XMPP SSL connection...
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:04:57] *** Connection established using EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA (TLSv1/SSLv3)
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:05:05] *** Attempting to authenticate using PLAIN
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:05:06] *** Authenticated.
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:05:15] *** You have successfully connected to Jabber.
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:05:15] *** ERROR: iq error 501
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:05:15] *** Retrieved user roster from server.
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:05:16] *** ERROR: iq error 501
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:05:16] *** ERROR: iq error 503 from gmail.com
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:05:16] *** ERROR: iq error 503 from gmail.com

If anyone has had anymore success, please let me know. I’m not sure how popular this is going to be; people usually tend to stay within a particular “IM clique” (with AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo! Chat being the major players). I use Trillian so that I can talk people in any one of these “cliques”.

This ends months of speculation and rumours about Google’s foray into the IM arena. I wonder what’s next?

UPDATE #1

I tried it again, this time with “Trillian” in the “Resource” field, no luck – Trillian still loses connection to the server. It comes up with a bunch of “Connection lost to server” errors.

[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:44:00] *** Creating connection "[my gmail id]@gmail.com/Trillian"
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:44:01] *** Server supports TLS encryption...
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:44:01] *** Negotiating XMPP SSL connection...
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:44:02] *** Connection established using EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA (TLSv1/SSLv3)
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:44:10] *** Attempting to authenticate using PLAIN
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:44:16] *** Authenticated.
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:44:21] *** Connection lost to server.
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:44:21] *** Connection lost to server.
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:44:21] *** Connection lost to server.
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:44:21] *** Connection lost to server.
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:44:22] *** Connection lost to server.
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:44:22] *** Connection lost to server.
[Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - 17:44:22] *** Connection lost to server.

UPDATE #2

I found this site that has instructions on getting Google IM to work through Jabber on Trillian. It has the same settings that I use, but they claim to have gotten it to work; although I see the same “Connection lost to server” errors on their status window as well. I also noticed that their status window shows the authentication being done with “username@talk.google.com” as oppsed to “username@gmail.com”, which is what I’m seeing.

UPDATE #3

Success (sort of)! It works now – I didn’t do anything different, I tried disconnecting and reconnecting, and now the connection seems to be stable. However, I’m unable to add anyone, or IM them. I tried adding myself, but was unable to do so. I’ll keep playing around anyway… Here are a few screenshots:

UPDATE #4

It looks like it’s working now – I still lose connection occasionally, but it seems much more stable than before. I have also been able to add people and IM them.