The Jabber folks have just announced that they’ll be releasing Jingle, an open set of extensions to the IETF’s Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) for use in VoIP, video, and other peer-to-peer multimedia sessions. Jingle is based on the protocol that Google uses in GoogleTalk, and the specs were co-written by engineers from Google and Jabber. A growing list of comapnies have already pledged support for the open protocol with a cute name, including Antepo, Cerulean Studios (Trillian), Coversant, Digium (Asterisk), Gaim, Jive Software, Novamens, Psi, SAPO, and Tipic. From the press release:

“Jingle provides a powerful framework for peer-to-peer multimedia sessions,” said Peter Saint-Andre, Executive Director of the Jabber Software Foundation and co-author of the Jingle specifications. “Thanks to Google’s commitment to open standards, the Jabber community can now build a wide range of new applications, from voice and video to file sharing, gaming, application casting, shared editing, and whiteboarding.”