The good old time, when Google used XMPP..

And Facebook, too. I miss using Pidgin for my facebook messages.

Does it not still do so?

I'm fairly certain that I'm using Pidgin's XMPP functionality to communicate with others that are receiving their end in Google Hangouts.

It used to do XMPP federation too; they might still be exposing XMPP C2S but federation is long gone.

Fun fact: if you were on a non-Google server talking to someone on Google Talk and they clicked the button to "upgrade" to Hangouts, on your end they would show up as perpetually "away" and any messages you sent them would be blackholed. Yes, that was as frustrating as it sounds.

OK, now you just solved a mystery to me

Yes and no.

- Google used to support XMPP federation, and they pulled the plug on that years ago.

- Any new features introduced as part of Hangouts haven't been backported to XMPP, and so there may be random breakage when XMPP users talk to Hangouts users.

Me too, right now using pidgin to communicate with coworkers via Hangouts. Tried everything to set it up with KDE Telepathy (I know, I know - it's just my personal account is still working with it) to no avail.

Google Talk*

There was no product named Google Chat until recently.

Everyone called it GChat, and the ~5 people I still communicate with on it still do.

Doesn't matter what the official name was, what everyone called it was GChat or Google Chat.

The official name matters when trying to distinguish between Google Talk and Google Chat.

I'd argue the official name de facto doesn't matter when there's been 5+ names for it in the last decade and nobody can keep track of it. Vast majority use it via their phones or in-browser GMail, I suspect.

(On topic: I use it with pidgin still though for the one-on-one chats with a few people!)

What about the precursor to Google talk? You know, chat integrated into Gmail before it was branded Google Talk.

I thought it was Google Chat.

It was released as a standalone app in 2006 (after having a labs beta period prior) as Google Talk, and integrated into Gmail in 2007. While the widget in Gmail (which was only removed very recently to replace it with a Meet widget!) was labelled Chats, the service itself never was.

I think they're actually referring to Google Hangouts Chat

> chat integrated into Gmail before it was branded Google Talk.

Hangouts chat came wayyyy after Google Talk or even its integration into gmail (I know, it's hard to keep track of the chronology of these Google services, they release 2 new ones a year)

Ugh, you're right. I failed. I was used to using the slang "GChat" back in the day.

Still works well through https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-hangouts. (I'm only using that through bitlbee-purple, not via Pidgin, but that should be largely irrelevant.)