A Day in Paradise

Google Talk

They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free. Google Talk enables you to call or send instant messages to your friends for free anytime, anywhere in the world.

Sounds like they really think they are doing something different, when in reality there is not much which is very special about google talk.

I tried out the official client, and the first thing that hit me was the sparse interface. What google has done is made the chat client as web-like as possible. In fact, you could probably whip up an AJAX client which is exactly identical in functionality. All links are underlined, and mcuh like web pages, there is nothing you will need to doubleclick on anything.

This works nicely with my theory that one morning we will wake up and find out that we won’t need anything more than firefox and google to be fully functional in our work and play.

A couple annoying things: No timestamps in the chat, no pasting of html… although links are made clickable. You can do some simple formatting using a *bold* and _italic_. Maybe there is a manual out there.

I tried the voice chat, it worked nicely. I only chatted with one person, so can’t say that it’s better than skype at this point, my one call was certainly no better than some chats I have had on skype which seemed to be totally flawless.

Google Talk is also tied into gmail so when you get a new email you’ll see a nice little message in the corner of your screen. Maybe I should start using my gmail some more.

Oh, well… I’m awormus@gmail.com add me

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 24th, 2005 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Reeeeely Geeeky, News, Entertainment, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.