Making Google Talk messages appear on all logged in clients

Question

We're using Google Talk as our unofficial-official chat client around the office at work. One thing that poses a big problem almost every day is the fact that Google Talk only sends a message to the clients that you last used. Even though you may be logged into GTalk on 3 different machines, if you start talking on one machine, that becomes your "active" machine, and if you go to another machine, you will still only get messages on the last active machine. Is there a way that you can force Google Talk to send messages to ALL logged in clients, regardless of which client you are actively using? That way, you don't miss any messages during the time between when you get up from the active machine and then make the new client "active".

Answer 1

Google Talk speaks the Jabber Protocol. Perhaps a different jabber client would work better for your purposes.

For example, I use Empathy, but if I happen to have a Gmail page open, I see the conversation in both places.

Answer 2

In some cases you can put the log in Dropbox, and share the log between clients.

Answer 3

Actually, by now i think this is the default behaviour, however, there is a security flaw worth mentioning. suppose you leave machine A running with a client and now you are at a different location using machine B with another client all the messages addressed to you are also visible to whoever is located where machine A is.

instead of enforcing the message to be delivered to ALL running clients, the protocol should leave it up to the developer to decide whether he want the message to spread among all clients or just the active one.

the fact that many clients also cache the session is an additional security issue that needs to be addressed.

Answer 4

I believe that's actually standard Jabber protocol handling. It's not a chatroom, it's designed to only send it to the place the person was last signed in, not be spammy to all devices/sessions.