Google Talk is still alive, well, and performing bi-directional message delivery between XMPP clients with a Google Talk account and Hangouts clients. (Or maybe

Google Talk is still alive, well, and performing bi-directional message delivery between XMPP clients with a Google Talk account and Hangouts clients. (Or maybe alive but for the fact that a Google VP hasn't noticed that it's still up and running. shrug) Any client that speaks XMPP should work just fine to reach into Google's IM silo for direct messaging. I make frequent, daily use of Pidgin for this purpose. Sadly, the only way to access group chats is through the official client. Also: If you haven't already, check out TextSecure by Open Whisper Systems. It has the best group-SMS handling of any MMS client I've tried. It's also made and maintained by a group of folks who are really concerned with making secure software that also happens to be as easy to use as is possible.