gtalk or Google Talk is an instant messaging and VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) application (Client Apps), developed/maintained by Google Inc. it’s free to use and available only for Windows (Xp, Vista or 7). gtalk uses XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) , an open standard communication protocol based on XML (Extensible Markup Language).
Features of gtalk at a Glance
- Instant Text Chat
- Instant Voice Chat(Audio/Video)
- Encrypted data transfer between the client and server
- Offline Messaging
but Gtalk is available only for Windows (Although Google had a plan to make it available for all platform, but..), so on Ubuntu there is another equivalent apps Gnome Talk(gtalk) that you can use, or You can also install gtalk(Google talk) on ubuntu 11.04 using Wine.
Empathy – Instant Messaging Client : Equivalent to gtalk
Empathy is a free and open source instant messaging client Apps for Ubuntu 11.04. it has almost all features, as you can find in gtalk. Empathy supports for ‘Google talk’, yahoo, AIM, MSN, Facebook and many instant messaging protocols. it’s installed by default, on Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal). So in order to start chatting just open it and enter the account details (protocol, username and password). That’s all, now you are ready chat (Text/Audio/Video) with gMail or Facebook friends.
Though Empathy comes close to my needs I still can’t switch to it until they provide Status / idle settings like in Pidgin.
John, it does ;P