(too late to append to my previous message) As someone that remembers the constant battle between AOL and third-party IM clients, I'll note that Google's handl

(too late to append to my previous message) As someone that remembers the constant battle between AOL and third-party IM clients, I'll note that Google's handling of XMPP feels similar to AOL transitioning from TOC to OSCAR[1]. The parallels are there. They provide a way for third-party clients to connect to their service, but make sure it's never as fully-featured as the 'official' client which uses an entirely different protocol. [1] The OSCAR protocol was more fully functional than the TOC protocol (e.g. 'buddy icons' didn't exist in TOC, nor the ability to directly connect and send images to a buddy), but AOL pointed to the TOC protocol when third-party IM clients wanted to connect to AOL's IM service. At one point, the OSCAR protocol would start doing things like requesting random binary chunks AOL's official IM client to assert that a third-party wasn't connecting to the service (i.e. working around this would mean distributing a copy of AOL's IM client, which allows AOL to sue).