Google may do IM

From the New York Times:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Google Inc. (GOOG.O) rose nearly 1 percent before the bell on Tuesday after the Los Angeles Times reported the Web search company will launch its own instant messaging system (ID:nN23524360).

I'm only one of a few hundred people who've been begging for an IM offering from Google for a year or more. Not only because it'd finally tie together the various mail, search and blogging tools and would therefore be an obvious move, but because Google and its "Don't be Evil" policy is the best hope for a standards-based IM app that we've got.

Reports are coming out (here, here and /. here) and Tom Servo bravely tried to connect to a Google Jabber server - see the pic, above - with his Trillian IM client:

Inquisitive Neowin member Tom Servo, taking a que[sic] from member CarlNewton tried to connect to talk.google.com using his Trillian client.

What he got was a secure XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, alternatively known as Jabber) server waiting for connections.

Could this be Google IM waiting to be unleashed? Since the server is using open source technology it'd be wonderful if anyone with a Jabber enabled chat client could use it (Trillian, GAIM, etc) and not just users of Google IM. While this hope is based on speculation, it does have some backing in the form of an active server.

The standard for IM applications is mostly well-defined, suffering only from a life of niche use, and stands to drive the future of short messaging everywhere. Google's rapid penetration into new marketplaces - huh huh, he said 'penetrate' - with its amazing take on old and crusty web tools is well demonstrated. If Google leads this charge and uses open protocols for establishing itself, the proprietary IM applications will soon be staring at their own extinction.

It'll be all over but the cryin'.