Jabber is the ineroperable-IM protocol… but only geeks even know it exists! With the advent of Google Talk there are more people using it — but many of them don’t even know it. So while Google has federated with the Jabber/XMPP universe, most IM users are still stuck in the MSN, Yahoo, AOL world unable to read out.

The big guys may only be in it for the money, but they’re not stupid. They know that having an account on every major IM network is a huge pain. They just haven’t figured out yet how to work together without losing their precious revenue. They seem to be moving in the right direction, however. The MSN Messenger (soon to be Windows Live Messenger) team has affirmed and re-announced their intention to federation with Yahoo Messenger.

It seems to be unclear whether this will be an actual network federation or a multi-client style feature. What I mean is, will only users of the newest versions of WLM be able to talk to Y!IM? What about older clients? What about Jabber transports? Obviously the transports should be able to evolve to support this (yay!) but whether they themselves allow for full network federation, I think, will be an indication of how ready the big guys are for interoperability.