Use Google Talk as a universal IM client!!!

Surprised…? Yeah. However, first come first… a disclaimer

I do not intend to take credit of all this procedure. Its just that I want to provide it easily to my friends and visitors of my blog. This method has been described by many on other webpages.

Okay, lets start now. As we know GTalk is based on Jabber and Google has opened up its servervs to other jabber servers, its possible to connect to Yahoo ( or MSN, AIM, ICQ, etc.) using GTalk.

There are Jabber servers functioning as ‘gateway’ (called ‘transports’) for other IM services. For example, I use geeklife.ru (yahoo.geeklife.ru is their Yahoo transport). You may find many of such servers here. So, we just need to connect GTalk from some other Jabber client (Psi, for example) and then configure it to connect to Yahoo (for example) and add friends from Yahoo’s list. Don’t worry… you won’t need to use this Jabber client again. You can freely use GTalk or even Gmail chat once you’ve added your friends from Yahoo.

For information on how to configure Psi to connect GTalk, see my earlier post Connecting Gtalk in linux using Gaim… Its not difficult to configure Psi if you can configure Gaim . Otherwise you may follow this step-by-step guide.

Lets now configure it for Yahoo…

1. Go to ‘Service Discovery’ and browse geeklife.ru (or whatever u find here) to find available transports.

2. Right click on Yahoo! Transport and select register.

3. Type in your Yahoo id and password and click ‘Register’ button.

4. Now Psi will connect to that network and retrieve your contacts. You can also add new contacts. At this stage you’ll get several system messages from Psi (one for each of your contacts in Yahoo). You need to open each message and click on ‘Add/Auth’ button to subscribe that person to GTalk.

5. Now quit Psi and start GTalk to see all your Yahoo contacts there.

You may also add contacts directly within Talk. Just use the format [login_id@[transport.dns.name].

Stay tuned… and don’t forget to leave your experience in comments