Connecting Google Talk To Other Chat Services

By Josh | August 21, 2007

Last week I posted about an article on Lifehacker about using Google Talk to connect to your friends on other chat services. Well, I finally got around to giving it a try myself, and I thought I’d post how it went.

Downloading Psi for Ubuntu was easy; it is available from the repositories. Going through the instructions on how to get Psi to work wasn’t to bad, except the part about trying to find a Yahoo transport. You have to find transports for each service that you use (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc.). Once I finally got all of my transports set up and all of my friends entered into my account, I thought I’d give Google Talk a try.

When I started Google Talk, all of my friends appeared, but the ones that were online did not appear online. I messed around with some other settings to see if I could get it to change, but I couldn’t. So from my experience, this isn’t worth it when you can easily download Pidgin or Gaim. This method could work for you, but it didn’t work for me; therefore, I don’t recommend it.