Finally something in the IM direction from Google. Google Talk is still beta (but Gmail is also beta and seems to be the best mail service for my needs). However there are few issues that have to be solved before I start using it seriously (not for experiments):

• Google Talk is not connected to public Jabber network. This is a big con, as I have many friends using Jabber and there are many Jabber servers offering nice services.
• There is some issue with offline messages, but it seems to be less important than previous point
• I am unable to connect to talk.google.com with my favourite Jabber client - ekg2

Well, thanks to the Google Talk I have lost part of the morning trying to connect from ekg2. Right now I have given up and asked others for help - maybe there is some obvious mistake in my setup. For sure more information will be appearing on many Jabber forums and blogs.

And now back to work, to my PVSS programming.

Update: Thanks to the pointers provided by the users of ekg2-users mailing list I was finally able to connect to talk.google.com with ekg2. The problem was that I had compiled ekg2 without libgnutls support.