So now we know at least part of the client side development that the Kirkland Google team has been working on– see David Bau’s post on Google Talk on the Google blog.

If you connect the dots, you can infer much of the rest of what they must be working on. Back in June, Adam Bosworth was writing in Ajax Reconsidered about how the browser isnt good at listening to external events, such as “an XMPP message or a VOIP request or a data-changed post for an ATOM feed.”

The XMPP comment was a clear leading indicator of Google Talk. Anyone reading carefully between the lines might have broken the story months early. Let’s suppose that the rest of the message is also a leading indicator of what Google would like to do with the browser.

Clearly, Google would have prefered to deliver Google Talk through the browser, but as Adam notes it’s just not possible using today’s technology.

Bosworth continues “Obviously, these things are fixable from a technical point of view. This isn’t rocket science. But if only one browser fixes them, it is unlikely to help at this point. We have a sort of deadly embrace. It is hard to predict how this will play out. History has shown that when innovation is stifled, sooner or later some one runs around it who has nothing to lose and changes the rules of the game completely. I’m confident that this will happen here as well.“

He goes on to say that truly mobile computing on smart devices will drive this innovation… neither WAP nor Java offers the right development model today. That may well be the case, but my own experience with working with the carriers suggests that are substantial barriers to the adoption of innovations such as a mobile browser that supports eventing, offline operations, and asynchronous network operations.

I think the mobile angle is a bit of a red herring. There has been long standing speculation that Google is interested in building a Google browser, and Bosworth’s comments give clear hints about a few of the areas that they’d like to invest in. (Not that they wouldn’t mind defining the mobile browser space as well, but I think the PC work will come first.)

Perhaps Adam’s has some inside knowledge that makes him so confident that the weaknesses in the Ajax model will get addressed.

What I don’t believe has been fully considered is the likelihood that Google’s efforts will span both the IE and Mozilla platforms. Note Adam’s comments about “But if only one browser fixes them, it is unlikely to help at this point.” It can’t be pure coincidence that many of the people hired by Google in their Kirkland office were original members of the Internet Explorer team.

Google is likely to drive adoption of their browser extensions by riding on the popularity of an application like Google Talk. You’ll download the bits because you want to chat, but in fact you’ll be buying into an extended browser platform that can deliver a variety of real time experiences that aren’t possible in today’s browser.