The latest in Google rumors include the company’s upcoming announcement of a possible instant messenger client, which would compete against MSN, Yahoo and AOL with their respective messaging applications. Although Google did not comment on the reports, The New York Times speculates the official announcement of Google Talk, the company’s instant messaging client, to be made this Wednesday. LA Times confirmed the name in one of its earlier news reports.

According to news stories, Google Talk is expected to use an open-source instant messaging back-end named Jabber. The initial reports of Jabber’s use were confirmed when users found talk.google.com as a functional sub-domain using Jabber for communication. The focus of Jabber would be to connect rival’s IM clients to work with Google Talk, thereby increasing its popularity immensely. Google Talk is expected to work with AIM, ICQ and iChat clients.

The preliminary reports also suggest that Google Talk may just be more than a text-messaging client. It’s expected to have voice conversing features like that of competing clients.

Google’s rival AOL is working on a new version of AIM while Yahoo has recently launched version 7 of Yahoo Messenger.

The reports also suggested that conversing feature in Google Talk, if true, could take away from Skype’s market share, which has seen a spike in users since last year.