Jingle (XEP-0166 and XEP-0167) is the voice and media signalling protocol developed by Google, Collabora, Yate, Tandberg and Jabber Inc (the latter two now part of Cisco), and standardized within the XSF.
Seen by many as key for an open-standard consumer VOIP system to compete with Skype and others, the specifications moved from Experimental to Draft status two years ago, and have been implemented in a large number of clients, including desktop and mobile handset environments.
Google’s original VOIP protocol, as used in Google Talk, was an important precursor to Jingle, and Google has now announced a switchover to Jingle as their “primary signalling protocol” for voice calls “to and from Gmail, iGoogle, and Orkut.”
Kevin Smith, XMPP Council Chair, who was also Chair when Jingle was advanced to Draft, said of the announcement:
“Google’s updates to use the standardised Jingle protocols will mean an increased chance of interoperability for streaming audio between XMPP users and will hopefully entice more developers into producing implementations and contributing to the standards process.”
Peter Thatcher of Google said in his announcement to the Jingle developers list that “the future is Jingle,” and went on
“I hope that this will be a support to the Jingle community and futher our efforts to have open standards for voice and video communication.”
– Dave Cridland
