Speaking of Google

Google Talk was released recently, providing instant messaging and audio chat capabilites for anyone with a GMail account. It's not exactly the greatest thing since steaming hot klava, but its audio chat feature did make me jump up and down with joy. Most of the reason for this was timing, as I'd spent a fruitless hour the previous evening buggering about with MSN and Yahoo audio chat, trying to talk to my buddy George back in Australia. We didn't get anywhere, so being able to install Google Talk, connect and start an audio chat in under a minute the following night was pure bliss on a stick.

So we chatted, and I was all prepared to write up how Google had once again (like they had with web searching, webmail and online mapping) taken an idea that was already pretty good and vaccuumed the suck out of it, creating something great. That isn't quite right though, as although Google Talk's audio chat functionality really does kick seven different types of ass, the rest of the client is kinda thin. Perhaps this is the Google UI way, but stuff like contact management and better integration with GMail would be nice. Emoticons are cute, but probably unnecessary. Emotisounds on the other hand, should never, ever be implemented.

The other downside Google Talk faces is convincing people to sign up for yet another messaging service, although this is significantly mitigated by the fact that Talk uses the same accounts as GMail. Most reasonably wired people already have GMail accounts, and a few of my friends use theirs as their primary email system. Talk already has a decent user base, but it's a long, long way from the limitless unwashed legions who infest MSN, ICQ and Yahoo.

This leaves Google Talk as an excellent way to do audio chat, although if that's its only purpose I might be better served using Skype, which can Skype Out to real world phone numbers for an additional fee, or Vonage, the VOIP telephony service with the ridiculous amount of online advertising. It all depends on what I want to use it for, and where the people I want to talk to are going to be. I won't throw Trillian away and demand all my friends switch to Google Talk, but I'll probably use it now for chatting long distance to various GMail-centric nerdboys, and for WoW voice chat (if it works, I haven't tested this yet). If Trillian builds a Talk plugin, or if Talk adds the ability to communicate with real phones, or they provide internal gateways between Talk and the other chat services, I may start using Talk fulltime, but for now I'll wait for version 2.