Ladies and gentlemen, check out Google Talk, instant messaging done by Google, and done right with an open protocol. Sign in with your Gmail account. Installing
WebProWorld Thanks to Google Talk can remove the need for your Gmail notifier, since it does that and lets you click through to check new emails. It saves your chat history. It plays sounds when you are in a different window, and has a notification box for when somebody IMs you while you're doing something else. Now, the cool stuff: Go right ahead and plug in your microphone, because Google Talk lets you talk, and really, really well. Making a call in Google Talk is as simple as clicking the "Call" button. Click, and you're doing voice chat. Amazingly, its bandwidth light. Matt told me (and he told me, not typed to me) that he wasn't seeing his usage top 10k, and Google Talk wasn't even the only web program he was using. I had an open Bit Torrent client uploading 70% of my bandwidth, and I saw no hiccups. Voice quality is excellent. No problems. Lag is almost nonexistent (less than half a second). You can have up to four active phone conversations, but can only talk to one person at a time. Everyone else is on hold. A quick aside: When you are on hold, the program does nothing to address that fact. Now, besides that Google needs to add a notification, why not a cool feature: On Hold Music. Wouldn't it be great if we could configure our Google Talk with hold music, a very small MIDI file that plays in a loop when on hold? That would be superb. Make sure to get yourself a microphone (and it doesn't have to be decent, mine isn't), because everyone will want to try out this feature. Next up: Compatibility. Google Talk uses the Jabber/XMPP protocol, and that means you can contact people on any client that supports the service (Trillian users have to buy the pro version). Google Talk
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Psi Trillian Pro And from the Developer FAQ:Google Talk supports XMPP with the beta release. We plan to support SIP in a future release. Additionally, we will evaluate other protocols as appropriate, to continue to deliver on our commitment to open communications. Today, Google Talk supports the following standard voice codecs: PCMA, PCMU, G.723, iLBC. We are also evaluating the Speex codec. We also support codecs from Global IP Sound: ISAC, IPCMWB, EG711U, EG711A As a first step towards fulfilling our commitment to federation, we will federate with EarthLink and Sipphone, service providers who share our belief in enabling user choice and open communications. We do not have details at this time on when federation will be enabled. But we are working closely with Earthlink and Sipphone to federate EarthLink's Vling service and Sipphone's Gizmo Project with the Google Talk service as quickly as possible, while offering the best possible user experience. We look forward to the Google Talk client supporting Linux and Mac OSX in the future.UPDATE: Reader Comments... InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines. Visit the
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