Journal

Getting Google Talk to work with Adium

I ranted on Twitter earlier this week about the frustrations of trying to get my Google Account (with no Gmail) working with Adium, my favourite Mac IM client. I’ve now fixed it, and learned a couple of things along the way.

One is that Google’s help really is far from helpful. Searching for information leads you to a forest of orphaned requests for support and advice, often under different product help sections and with a pervading sense that you might be shouting, but no-one – and certainly not at Google – is listening. A deeply unsatisfactory experience.

So, here’s how you do it. Concidentally, it took logging in to the Google’s PC-only Talk client whilst running Parallels on my Mac, to stumble across the solution. There is, it appears, an issue for any Google Account trying to use Google Talk without an associated Gmail address.

The workaround is as follows:

• add Gmail to your Google Account (I know, bear with me)
• login in to Google Talk using your new Gmail address using whatever client you want
• go to your ‘My account’ on Google and select ‘edit products’ and choose to permanently delete your Gmail account
• login in to Google Talk again, this time using your original Google Account settings.

Confusing and utterly counter-intuitive. But it works.