Wow, I’d like to thank Google for enabling Voice and Video chat in Linux. Thank you for taking the time and effort to support our platform!
In Ubuntu we’ve been shipping Empathy, a chat client based on the Telepathy framework, which has supported Video chat over gtalk (a jabber based network) for quite some time (see my answer on Stack Exchange). In case you didn’t know, Empathy (and the underlying guts) has been primarily developed and supported by a company in the UK called Collabora; who have been funding this work for quite some time. And yeah, they’re basically awesome people to hang out with.
I am wondering why it took Google over 2 years to support this feature. Google decided to support Jabber on purpose, for whatever reason when they launched gtalk; they’ve always been good at supporting open standards, but they never supported this feature until just now. Why?
Those of use using Empathy/Telepathy have been enjoying audio/video support for quite some time, so we know it’s technically possible. And as it works out the people who make our operating system WANT to ship features like this OUT OF THE BOX. Maybe they wanted to and couldn’t get it quite out the door until now. Who am I to complain, without gtalk the Jabber protocol would probably not be as popular, so thanks for that Google folks for putting their hand in that.
I can’t help but wonder why Google would support Jabber right off the bat with gtalk but it would take them so long to support the video/audio feature until now; our Telepathy friends seemed to figure it out — but I don’t want to dwell on that, what I do want to dwell on is a message we need to send to companies like Google: how can we better improve our platform so that it doesn’t take you 2 years to support us.