Googling for "ichat google chat jabber"

Every time I start up Apple iChat, which I confess is not often, I get an error message stating that iChat couldn't connect to any Jabber servers.

I don't use Jabber. Or at least, I didn't think I did. A long time ago I got it in my head that I should be able to use Google's Google Talk service with iChat and set it up to use Google Talk's Jabber interface.

I don't know why it hasn't been working, and I don't know how long it's been like that. So the basic idea I had when I woke up this morning was simply "make the error message go away, and if you can get signed into Google Talk in the process, so much the better."

How do you fix a software problem like Google Talk? You Google for Google, of course. The instruction are fairly clear for setting up iChat to use Google Talk. The exception is that, though it exactly specifies that you must change your "Location:" field to the string "iChat" in order to make the service work, it says this in very tiny letters that counterindicate what the big pretty screenshot shows. Caveat emptor.