This is a 16 year old front end to the same chat service that you think of as Gmail chat / Gchat / Hangouts / etc., not sure if that's clear.
If it's only a frontend how does "we'll end our support for third-party apps, including Pidgin and Gajim" make sense? Just coinciding?
That's what made me assume it was a whole stack rather than interface to a backend.
Ironically, Google Talk has already been on there and shows "2005 - 2013", so tells you about the accuracy of these websites.
Almost everyone was kicked off Google Talk and shoveled into Hangouts around 2013. I'm amazed to hear it was still running in some form.
By "kicked off" you mean seamlessly migrated over. The fact that you're amazed Talk itself was still running shows how well the migration went.
No, I mean kicked off. I was forced from one app to another whose UI I considered inferior.
Call it "forced migration" if you must, but it's a distinction without a difference.
I think it's Google's branding. Google Talk used to be a desktop app on your PC that eventually became hangouts which lines up with the sunset in 2013 when desktop apps kind of died.. I think for some reason, google is called this Google Talk instead of hangouts and moving people to chat.
Yeah, Google Talk is also the name of their XMPP integration but it was seamless with Hangouts.