Jabber and GTalk sittin' in a tree, l-a-g-g-i-n-g
I've been trying to switch over completely from AIM to Jabber, a difficult task since very few people I know use Jabber. Recently, though, GTalk started interoperating with Jabber; "Hallelujah!", I thought. Such optimism was premature, it seems.
On more than one recent occasion I have been chatting with a GTalk-using friend late at night, and the lag has ranged from merely bad to simply horrendous. I'm not talking five or ten seconds here; I'm not even talking two or three minutes. I'm talking over fifteen minutes for a message to travel from one side of campus to the other. My messages (sent from Gaim through the jabber.org server) would apparently reach my friend relatively quickly, but his would seem to get lost somehwere in cyberspace for a quarter of an hour before deciding finally to meander over to me.
Perhaps just as bad as the lag was the fact that messages would arrive out of order, which makes a conversation nearly impossible to follow. The lag snuck up on us, too: since we were mostly staying on a single topic, we didn't realize what was going on until I thought to ask whether my friend was getting my messages. I got his response over ten minutes later, and the lag only got worse from there.
I sincerely hope that whatever party is responsible for this state of affairs rectifies it soon; in the meanwhile, I've had to revert to AIM for talking with some of my friends. For all its flaws, at least AIM works.