Google has just announced for Google Talk. So what the open federation is? Follow me for short. As you might notice, you can send e-mails from your account (university, company or gmail) to whoever you want in this world identified by an e-mail address. For IM, you don"t have this capability at all. If you are on MSN, you can"t chat with Yahoo IM. Open federation lets us talk to other parties across IM service provider. Oops! IM is going to be a general service like e-mail.

Don"t expect too much! Open federation might help anyone in this world to talk using their own IM address served a service provider near them but it is totally based on XMPP innovated by Jabber Community. If you are mainly on MSN, you might need to ask your IM provider to enable MSN service on Jabber service.

Anyway, someday IM service provider might come to this world. There will be no more MSN, Yahoo, AIM, or etc separately.. Hopefully, Google Talk supports sending file soon.

You can only talk to people on the particular service you have an account on (so you need an account on every service to talk to everybody, which is pretty cumbersome). With open federation, you get to choose your service provider and you can talk to people on any other federated service (and vice versa).

In addition to the Google Talk service, many other companies, universities, and corporations support open federation today. This means you can now talk to millions of users around the world all with a single account on the service provider of your choice.

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