I don't think it's reasonable to expect Google Talk to remain indefinitely though - if you need XMPP you at least want an exit strategy if Hangouts isn't suitable. It's quite telling that the Hangouts app on Android is called "Hangouts (replaces Talk)" and takes Talk's URL in the play store.
In GTalk's case any XMPP client will do so an official app is almost irrelevant in its case.
Right, but you still need Google's XMPP server to support it.
It's still there.
For now.
Despite the clear warning signs, I am willing to put money on people whinging in a year or two when they shut down those servers, just like everyone got all upset about Reader.
And whining about shutting down Reader accomplished what, exactly?
Absolutely nothing of course. Didn't stop people from whining; people love to whine on the internet.
There was no good replacement for Reader two years ago. There are plenty of federated XMPP servers around now.
Plenty of federated XMPP servers, true, but unlike Reader, XMPP requires other users on federated servers to be useful. Since the Reader brouhaha I'd been considering moving away from GApps back to hosting my own mail and xmpp. Now Google has made the XMPP side of that worthless, 87% of my IM contacts use G(Mail|Talk), and will switch to Hangouts.
If they do that, people will migrate off Gmail too. I know I will.
"may" my ass. Google forced the Google+ extension on me faster than Steve Jobs used to declare that white was the new black.
Will GTalk be able to communicate to users of Hangouts, though, or will everyone be forced over to Hangouts in order to continue to speak to the people who move over? I'm guessing the latter.
Yes, for now they're basically the same service. I'd imagine that this will change as Hangouts diverges more and more from what Talk supports, to the point where Talk will be killed due to disuse.
don't expect that to last too long. the google talk android app updates to become hangouts, and the chrome extension became hangouts automatically today.
Until it gets killed, in 2 years from now. Or less.