(PC Pro) When Google Talk launched last year the company promised that interoperability would be a feature. The search engine has now announced that Talk will communicate or ‘federate’ with any service provider that supports the industry standard XMPP protocol. Among those companies Google Talk will communicate with are Earthlink, Gizmo Project, Tiscali, Netease, Chikka, MediaRing, and what Google says are thousands of other ISPs, universities, corporations and individual users. Interoperability in the instant messaging sector has been demanded by users for many years. However, rivalry between the big three IM companies – Yahoo! Microsoft and AOL – has meant that any discussions on allowing their respective IM clients to talk to each other have stalled. Read more