Published reports in the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere indicate that Wednesday may be launch day for a Jabber-based IM service from Google.

According to the LA Times' report, the service will be called "Google Talk" and is set for Wednesday launch. The Times report also says that people with access to the service have reported Google Talk will include VoIP (define) functionality of some sort.

Speculation about Google's entry into the IM market has been on the back burner since an initial burst of enthusiasm for the topic just over a year ago, when rumors began to circulate that Google's purchase of photo service Picasa and its accompanying image-sharing IM service "Smile" presaged an eventual IM offering.

Lending some credence to the possibility that a Google-based IM service may finally be set to launch came from reports on message boards across the Internet, where users successfully connected (but failed to authenticate) with a Jabber server listening on port 5222 at talk.google.com. Other attempts to establish a telnet connection to port 5222 on the same server netted some curious users an XML response from a listening Jabber server, and others have reported being able to establish a login with their Jabber clients using their Google account information.