Today, we are offering you an alternative to use all your IM contacts in one free Blackberry application – Google Talk (ok, you might still use Yahoo messenger separately but still). Few years ago, an open IM transport protocol was born – meet Jabber. Jabber is special, as it offers so called transporter protocols, which can transport IM messages between different IM networks.

With use of free Google Talk IM client (which is based on Jabber), Blackberry users have ability to communicate with users on different IM networks, and usage is transparent for both sides. Users do not know that we are not on their IM network, as he sees us identically as if we would be. Because of some specifics of each protocol we will have to forget advanced features like file transfers, but is this really something we would do on Blackberry?

How to do it?

We will describe process for setting up MSN thru Google Talk blackberry application, but you can do it for other IM networks, like ICQ and AIM with almost identical procedure.

First you need an IM application on your PC that supports advanced features of Jabber. One of best ones (and free) is Psi. This procedure must be completed only once, but even so we recommend that you keep Psi installed on your PC afterwards.

After Psi is installed, go to General menu, and choose Account setup. Add your Gmail account information. Jabber already knows Google’s talk service, so you don’t have to set up any advanced configuration (just username and password will do).

In main application windows, we now select our account, and right-click on it. In menu we choose Status and the Online. Psi should now successfully connect to Google talk servers and you should be online (and should see your contacts). Once this is done, proceed with right-clicking on account again, and choosing Service Discovery.

Now we must select the server, that will do the transformation between various IM protocols. The easier way is to select one of freely available open server, list of which can be found here. Enter server’s URL to Address field and then click Browse. Try few servers, and find one that supports MSN Transport (or any other IM if you can to add support for other IM networks). We are using the ihrisko.org server, but other might offer even more IM protocols, so check them out… From list of supported service, choose service that you want, and right-click on it, and choose Register. Enter your login/password details for selected IM network, and confirm import of data to Google Talk.

Now comes the most dull part of the process, as we must manually confirm every and all of our contacts (but only once). After this is complete we can close the Psi (and even uninstall it). If we connect to our Google Talk (thru PC or Blackberry) we should see all our contacts.

Notes

Using this solution changes a few things. Message history is saved to special folder inside our Gmail account on Google’s server. We can search thru it on the same way as we do with email.

Google talk supports multiple connections at the same time (and MSN does not), so when we are connected to MSN via phone, our PC MSN client will disconnect.

Because of differences between protocols we will not see our personal aliases for contacts (if we renamed them), but picture and personal info will be preserved.

If you are using on of the free available public transport servers, you should be aware that our messages are transmitted thru them, which could impact your privacy.

This solution is a bit complicated, but we are using it and it is working. Note that new Blackberry OS 4.5 will most probably offer new multi-network IM client, but it might remain hidden for months to come, before operators push proper service libraries…