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Google Talk supports XMPP federation and has done so since January 2006. To deal with an onslaught of spam, Google disabled incoming subscription requests for a short time. During this time, all other XMPP federation features continued to work.

Hangouts does not use XMPP, but it's a feature that they didn't implement. It's not something that they disabled.

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While Google has not announced an actual EOL of Google Talk, you can no longer download the desktop client and the Android application tries to directly upgrade to Google Hangout.

From a systems perspective, they have basically prevented anyone new from getting on Google Talk. I am expecting an EOL announcement at some point, as they are otherwise making it hard to get into.

See https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... and http://talk.google.com

Yeah, Google Talk will probably be included on the third spring cleaning list. When Google drops support for XMPP federation, it will be because they are killing an entire product. It will not be because they are disabling a feature.

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