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Google Businesses The Internet

How Google Could Overthrow AIM 587

Posted by CmdrTaco from the defacto-standards dept.
An anonymous reader writes "There's an interesting article over at Apple-X.net that speculates on the possibility of an instant-messaging service offered by Google that would be based on the open Jabber protocol. If Jabber was supported by a major company like Google, it could dominate over proprietary services such as AIM or MSN."
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How Google Could Overthrow AIM More

How Google Could Overthrow AIM

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  • hahah. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jabella ( 91754 ) * on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:11PM (#10049791) Journal
    speculates on the possibility

    just made me laugh.

  • Finally (Score:3, Interesting)

    by WALoeIII ( 758807 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:12PM (#10049801) Homepage Journal
    Finally a service that would focus on the messaging, not on locking people out.

  • ICQ (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Free Bird ( 160885 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:12PM (#10049805)
    I still fail to see what's wrong with ICQ, except for the fact that all !geek people have stopped using it...
    Ah, to think of the time when everybody who used any IM program used ICQ. Those were the days...

    • Re:ICQ (Score:5, Funny)

      by ejaw5 ( 570071 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:19PM (#10049902)
      Hey, this what's your ICQ#?

      57007188888

      How about yours?

      16085588888

    • Re:ICQ (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Scoria ( 264473 ) <{slashmail} {at} {initialized.org}> on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:20PM (#10049912) Homepage
      Any version beyond "ICQ98" was extremely bloated, and those who weren't offended by the bloat were offended by the presence of AOL, who had acquired ICQ and was attempting to deprecate it in favor of AIM. Many of us can also recall the blatant security vulnerabilities inherent to the ICQ protocol, including "ICQ identity theft," which was somewhat commonplace around 1999.

      • Re:ICQ (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ThogScully ( 589935 )
        I never really heard about identity theft on ICQ - never really looked into it.... but that explains why I lost my really low UID there... The username and password were just different all of a sudden one day.

        I did signup for a new one but never told anyone I knew about it, so essentially I didn't use ICQ anymore.
        -N

    • Re:ICQ (Score:5, Funny)

      by Malc ( 1751 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:32PM (#10050083)
      ICQ? Listen here kiddo, I'm still upset by these upstart juniors using ntalk and ytalk!

  • Don't think so (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:12PM (#10049806)
    It'll run into the same problem as all other new and supposedly better IM protocols -- "all my friends are on [AIM|ICQ|MSN|...] so I use that".

  • Wha? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hexghost ( 444585 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:12PM (#10049807) Homepage
    Interesting, but I don't see how Google would do it without a large amount of time. Trying to convince people like my little sister to give up her little world of AIM for something entirely new for no real benefit would be really difficult.

    • Re:Wha? (Score:5, Funny)

      by bs_testability ( 784693 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:17PM (#10049871)
      wouldn't she be excited to change once she hears that a bot will be monitoring the conversation in order to place context sensive ads in the margin?

    • Re:Wha? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Scaba ( 183684 ) <joe@joefranDEBIANcia.com minus distro> on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:23PM (#10049961)

      I'm just guessing, but Google would probably offer the ability to connect to the other four major services through their client, ala Kopete|Gaim|Trillian. I think the Jabber protocol supports this. And if they use Qt, they could simultaneously release Linux, win32 and OSX clients. (I know they could use Gtk, but why torture us?)

      • Re:Wha? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Matt Perry ( 793115 ) <perry.matt54@ya[ ].com ['hoo' in gap]> on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:50PM (#10050299)
        I'm just guessing, but Google would probably offer the ability to connect to the other four major services through their client, ala Kopete|Gaim|Trillian. I think the Jabber protocol supports this.
        Jabber does support that but on the server side. That means if AOL, MSN, etc want to block Google IM clients from using their networks, they just have to block Google's Jabber servers rather than try and change their protocols.

    • Re:Wha? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by TheKubrix ( 585297 )
      Thats ignorant. How do you think Google even came into existence? Were they there when the Internet first opened up to the mainstream public? No. We had crap like Webcrawler, Yahoo, and eventually Altavista. And then out of no where a company delivered to the unwashed masses an engine that was perfect in every which way, and now they DOMINATE. So back then, a couple college kids went up against the big boys, and they won. And now that they have significant capitol, waging war in a medium where all the curr

    • Re:Wha? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 )

      Trying to convince people like my little sister to give up her little world of AIM for something entirely new for no real benefit would be really difficult.

      I suppose a good number of people will run both clients in parallel for a while. Then, if more and more people choose Google IM and don't bother to fire up the other client anymore, others will see a shrinking list of on-line contacts on the old client and drop it as well.

      It depends of course on how well Google's client will measure up:
      - It better

  • IM's (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Egonis ( 155154 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:13PM (#10049811)
    I used to be a hardcore ICQ User (still have it installed with a few contacts now)... but the mass public moved to MSN all of a sudden -- is this in part to the fact that Microsoft shoved it down our throats?

    ICQ can do offline messaging, which MSN can't without an annoying add-in installed.

    ICQ can do SMS, so can MSN now, but with another add-in... this is all previously achieved technology.

    I welcome the concept of Google making an Instant Messenger, please do! They'd probably do a better job at it without almost nightly downtimes of their servers.

    • Re:IM's (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LogicX ( 8327 ) * <slashdot AT logicx DOT us> on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:15PM (#10049847) Homepage Journal
      I'd like to go further and say that MSN is popular overseas and with lots of foreigners. Majority of americans I know use AIM; but everyone at school whos from India uses MSN like its their job.

    • yes, but ICQ had a *HORIBLE INTERFACE* (Score:5, Interesting)

      by autopr0n ( 534291 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:20PM (#10049911) Homepage Journal
      While ICQ may have had some usefull features (feel free to dig through the 450 page manual), the interface was awfull. It got killed by AIM and MSN because they were simple to use.

    • IT was the ICQ spam (Score:3, Interesting)

      by LordZardoz ( 155141 )
      I switched over to MSN because of the amount of spam coming in over ICQ. Aside from that, the interface for MSN simply feels better (messages sends when you hit enter by default, simple appearance). While ICQ can be setup to do all that MSN does by default, its the fact that MSN does it by default.

      END COMMUNICATION

    • Re:IM's (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pherthyl ( 445706 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:40PM (#10050177)
      Simple case of a crappy interface (icq) being trumped by a simple one (MSN). Love it or hate it, the MSN interface is very simple to use, everyone can figure it out. I use a clone of it for linux (aMsn) with a couple more features but still retaining that simple interface.
      I used ICQ for years but it always seemed clunky, and had a million features that were useless. ALso MSN was the first with a webcam feature that just worked behind firewalls, and little things like games that people liked to play.
      ICQ lost because they were perpetually in beta and even with years head start never managed to make a good client.

  • Go Google. (Score:5, Informative)

    by caluml ( 551744 ) <slashdot@spamgoe ... minus herbivore> on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:13PM (#10049817) Homepage
    "Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."
    Heh - same as always :)

    I'd love to see Google get in with Jabber. Joogle? I use Jabber. But everyone I try to get on there simply says: But all my friends are on MSN. Some people have never ever heard of Yahoo, AIM, or the old classic, ICQ. Go Google, I say. Oh, and don't be evil. Although I'll be using SSL and GPG over Jabber, as usual.

    • Re:Go Google. (Score:5, Funny)

      by bbk ( 33798 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:40PM (#10050174) Homepage
      It would be obviously named "Gibba", so when you refer to it you sound like Mr. T.

      "I pity the fool who doesn't use Gibba Jabber!"

      - bbk

    • IMoogle (Score:3, Funny)

      by poopie ( 35416 )
      I propose the name IMoogle.

      It just sounds so funny.

      Last thing we need are more applications that have a generic name preceded by x,g, or k (or i)

      Can't you just imagine the discussions about rolling out "Enterprise IMoogle"

  • Wishful thinking (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sessamoid ( 165542 ) * on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:14PM (#10049830)
    This isn't even a rumor. It's basically one guy saying he wishes Google would start a Jabber-based messaging service. How is this front page material?

  • They forget (Score:3, Interesting)

    by agent dero ( 680753 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:14PM (#10049835) Homepage
    AIM is already very deeply embedded with many people, even some corporations use it.

    Jabber's been around, along with MSN, and Yahoo, still most people I know (personal and online life) use AIM.

    You forget that this major ISP that is the largest on the planet, kinda, includes AIM in it's program ;)

  • Advertising? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by avalys ( 221114 ) * on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:14PM (#10049838)
    I don't know if their ad-supported model would work in IM, though. I prefer my IM windows to be small and inconspicuous - I don't know if I'd like having text ads (of any size) cluttering up my display.

    • Re:Advertising? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by caluml ( 551744 ) <slashdot@spamgoe ... minus herbivore> on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:41PM (#10050187) Homepage
      I don't know if their ad-supported model would work in IM, though.

      Information, dear boy, information. If they know what everyone it talking about, saying what they wished they had, etc, they can target ads more effectively at the rest of us.

      Sort of reminds me of that saying (which I can't properly remember now): Beware of he who would control access to information, for in his heart, he wants to be your master.

  • How does this fit the Google company quest? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nomihn0 ( 739701 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:15PM (#10049841)
    Google's business is to make things easier to find and understand. How would an instant messaging program be applicable to this mission? The question is what spin Google could put on IMing to make it their own. Just like GMail added conversations and the Google search function, GMessage would need a catch.

    • Re:How does this fit the Google company quest? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Hollins ( 83264 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:30PM (#10050060) Homepage
      Google's killer app seems to be converging to finding exactly the information one needs with the simplest interface possible. To accomplish this, they're getting in the business of storing and processing our information, and by (so far), not being evil, we trust them to do so.

      With gmail, we can search all old emails with the same simple interface as searching the web. Now, add IM transcripts (great for business), PIM information, etc. Maybe someday, they'll aggregate even more personal stuff, like bank statements, my car's service history, and so on.

      The end result? With the beautifully simple default google interface, I could ask:
      • Show me the conversation with my boss regarding TPS reports.
      • What did I spend on dining out last month?
      • When is the kids' pediatrician appointment?
      • How do I get there?


      Think of any piece of information you recently looked up or asked for, on computer or hardcopy. Imagine typing it into google and getting the answer.

      It could be really cool, and kinda creepy. MS and Yahoo are at a disadvantage to pull this off because: they're behind the curve on search engine technology (look at MS's recently yanked beta), they'll never take the leap of faith to give users an incredibly stripped, ad-free interface (I know yahoo offers one, but they deemphasize it), and not nearly as many people will trust them with this stuff as would trust google.

      IM makes a nice next step.

  • joogle.com taken (Score:3, Informative)

    by RobertB-DC ( 622190 ) * on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:15PM (#10049850) Homepage Journal
    joogle.com is already taken by a search spammer, though joogle.net has expired and could become available Any Day Now. I'd love to be able to one day say "I rescued [a-z]oogle!"... or alternatively, "I got a nastygram from Google!"

    So, I'm OOgling the 1,430 entries for *oogle.* [whois.sc], just in case there's one somebody else missed...

  • sounds like... (Score:5, Funny)

    by cavebear42 ( 734821 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:17PM (#10049874)
    One engine to index them all
    one engine to find them,
    One engine to return them all
    and to the results bind them.

  • What would it mean? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonym1ty ( 534715 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:17PM (#10049879) Homepage Journal

    I don't know if the story is anything to do with Jabber. I mean look at it this way; What would it mean if Google started its own IM service period?

    Yahoo did it and what did that mean? AIM/AOL are still here. But the thought is interesting enough as it is.

    As for an open protocol... I don't know if it would mean a whole hell of a lot. I like the IM but I also like the ability to use VoIP or Video if I want.

    Whatever Google comes up with I can only speculate that the quality of the clientele would be a lot highr than either AOL or MSN. I'm using Y! now, but more as it's the only one I have after ruling the other two out that has any number of people to be able to chat with.

  • IM has never been about software or protocals, (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Clockwurk ( 577966 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:17PM (#10049881) Homepage
    it always has and always will be "What are all my friends using".

    It also seems a bit silly for Google to be interested in IM. Google's services always revolve around searching (even gmail), something that isn't very useful for IM. They could perhaps make finding buddies or finding past conversations easier, but other than that, I fail to see where google could work their magic.

    • Public IM discussions indexed and searchable (Score:4, Interesting)

      by dotslash ( 12419 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @06:27PM (#10050667) Homepage

      Google can leverage its search technology by logging "public" IM conversations and making them indexable. Users can pick if they want their chat room/IM conversation public and have everything indexed.

      You could do an interview with someone, and have it captured and indexed. Or the IETF could hold a committe meetting in a public chat room, knowing that there is an instant public archive.

      Someone searching might find a snippet of a conversation. From there, Google could provide the full thread by moving backwards or forwards from the snippet that was a hit.

      Of course, most conversations would be private, but some might choose to have public discussions.
      As long as it's not evil.

  • Why Google and why Instant Messaging? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sanity ( 1431 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:19PM (#10049900) Homepage Journal
    What makes Google the right company to do this - is it only that they can get sufficient eyeballs?

    If so, there is nothing particularly interesting about this. Sure, any piece of software that gets a direct link from the Google front page is going to have a massive advantage over its competitors, and yes, were that to happen, it would be nice if that software happened to use an open protocol with lots of open source clients.

    The fact that he chose instant messaging as the application, and Google as the big powerful company with all the eyeballs is somewhat irrelevant, the same would be true of almost any application and almost any company with a massively popular website.

    Of course, if the big powerful company just happens to be Google, the darling of Slashdot editors, then it certainly won't hurt his advertising click-through revenue :-)

  • Searchable IMs? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JTWYO ( 583112 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:19PM (#10049901)
    I'd really like this if it meant I could search my IMs the way Google allows the searching of GMail (as I understand it). With AOL instant messenger, which I use due to all my friends using it, there's no archive at all, so a good chunk of my daily correspondence is lost forever. If there was some privacy-friendly way that I could store all my IMs and search them for important links and discussions I've had, using Google's powerful tools, I would definitely jump ship and try to bring as many people with me as possible.

  • This won't happen any time soon (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Espectr0 ( 577637 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:20PM (#10049920) Journal
    Still, i would like it to happen. But if google wants to kill msn et all, jabber has to first support audio and video chat.

    They are too busy with their current projects. Gmail has been in beta for almost half a year and it still isn't final. And still as a beta project, they made yahoo and msn catch up to provide more space.

    I wonder how google IM would shape up aim, yahoo, msn and icq.

  • As long as they don't call it "Goober" (Score:4, Funny)

    by 5n3ak3rp1mp ( 305814 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:21PM (#10049931) Homepage
    They will do fine.

    Note about MSN- Contrary to you folk apparently, all MY friends have moved to AIM. Perhaps there are pockets of users that use one or the other.

    Note about offline messages- I have also bemoaned this ICQ feature lacking in MSN/AIM. But really, that sort of functionality is what email is for.

  • Jabber great because of encryption (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:23PM (#10049966) Journal
    All I care about is whether or not I get end-to-end encryption.

    The reason Jabber is so great is because of its encryption support. I can load up gabber and use SSL (and end-to-end GPG encryption within *that*).

    If Google gives me end-to-end encryption, Google will win me and everyone I can convince over. Everything else is irrelevant. The current state of IM security is abysmal.

    That means that there will be a single party that can monitor who communicates with who (not ideal, but not that far from the existing cell phone situation), but not the *content*.

  • Miranda (Score:3, Informative)

    by hey ( 83763 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:24PM (#10049984) Journal
    Try Miranda [miranda-im.org]. a very nice open source multi IM protocol client. Including Jabber, of course.

    • GAIM (Score:3, Informative)

      by raquelita ( 766845 )


      GAIM [sourceforge.net] is another open souce muliplatform and multi IM protocol client.

      I use it in Linux and Win, for messaging in MSN, ICQ and Jabber :-)

  • Use them all! (Score:3, Informative)

    by randomErr ( 172078 ) <.ervin.kosch. .at. .gmail.com.> on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:29PM (#10050053) Journal
    Just use GAIM and you can use all the major protocals, including AIM, MSM, and Jabber.

  • God, i hope so (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:30PM (#10050065)
    I would kill for an unified IM system; Jabber is the best out there so far. There's a good primer at http//www.jabber.org [slashdot.org], but basically, think of an instant e-mail; the network stays decentralized. No one controls it, there's not a single server running the show. Not only that, right now Jabber can be "bridged" onto other IM networks, so transition can be smoothed, to a degree. Your own ISP could host a Jabber server for you, with the same username as your mail, for example. Neat stuff.

    The protocol is also well designed, as far as i've looked into it. I'm forced to use MSN, and i've already stumbled into the "can't block annoying kids" problem. ICQ is nice, but seems to be dying, and AOL i can't stand.

  • Have we found the missing step 2? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Knight2K ( 102749 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:39PM (#10050160) Homepage
    1. Pick a popular Internet technology
    2. Attach Google's name to it.
    3. Profit!!!

    Here are a few:

    If Google made a MMORPG it would rule the earth!

    If Google made a Linux distribution with Spotlight-like search, it would rule the earth!

    If Google let me host all my MP3's it would rule the earth!

    Seriously though, it might be interesting to have all of my IM history searchable, but I mostly use it for one-off conversations about things of limited importance.

    Besides, as general benevolent as Google seems to be, do we really want to route sensitive messages through a central place? Especially with the recent Slashdot articles about VOIP being required to support wire taps. [slashdot.org] Do we want adwords showing up keyed off of our IM conversations? How could we secure such a system?

  • Posters without vision.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iamsure ( 66666 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:41PM (#10050194) Homepage
    Many posters are asking why Google, what would they add, etc..

    What little vision!

    First and foremost, searching archives of IM's sucks on almost every windows client there is. GAIM, Miranda, Trillian, AIM, MSN-IM, etc etc. Thats a niche waiting for them - they are the kings of search.

    Second, for Google to be universal, they need contact management soon. They need to know WHO someone is. Orkut is a step there. Gmail's contact manager *sucks*.

    Combine the two, AND an instant messenger that interoperates between all the networks ALA GAIM, and you suddenly have a complete profile, 6+ potential screennames, possibly a website, their gmail address, and voila - you have a strong awareness of who the user is.

    NOW use THAT to improve search results - google for pages that Linus Torvalds wrote. Now google knows what his IM names are, what his webpage is, what his gmail address is, and can specify ALL of those pages containing those items as "better hits" than just any webpage. It can even do it transparently (hidden) for better security.

    Taking it a step further, you now have the makings of a web-based contact management system - email, IM, blogs, profiles, images, all from their various packages.

    Sounds visionary to me!
    • This would be like tape-recording all your spoken conversations. What do you need to search your IM conversations for ? "Hey, you called me this-and-that on January 24th, 2005 11:23:11, don't deny it ! I got proof !" Yeah. Great. Well... perhaps not.

      It's already more than enough that I can find all the shit I wrote on usenet ten years ago when I was young and foolish on Google groups as well as my old, for me long inaccessible homepages from 94/95 on Google. If Microsoft tried this, everyone would be up in

  • forget jabber.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Suppafly ( 179830 ) <slashdot@s[ ]afly.net ['upp' in gap]> on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:46PM (#10050257)
    forget jabber, google should just make an aim client.

  • google can succeed in IM just as with search (Score:3, Informative)

    by flacco ( 324089 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @05:58PM (#10050376)
    leveraging open source software, google offered excellent, browser-agnostic search with a minimum of clutter and advertising.

    over the long term, this can be the same formula for success in IM. there is inertia and critical mass to overcom re: existing IM services, but the jabber technology, being free/open, and striving for interoperability with other protocols for its own sake instead of some strategic market share move, has a lot to offer.

    i recently turned on a co-worker's windows pc, and practically got dizzy when the advertisement-laden AOL signon thing came up.

  • Hello? Google already owns an IM client. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 ) <judgmentalist@gmail.com> on Monday August 23, 2004 @06:06PM (#10050445) Journal
    Google owns Hello [hello.com]. This is a photo-oriented IM client that they got along with Picasa [picasa.com], the (excellent) iPhoto knockoff.

    I hope everyone who just said Google doesn't care about IM kicks themself in the head. You dumbasses.

    Hello is pretty, & it works with Blogger & Picasa. It is good Windows software, which is all that Google seems to be interested in for the desktop.

  • Apple is supporting Jabber (Score:3, Informative)

    by HELLO.JPG ( 676706 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @06:17PM (#10050561) Homepage Journal
    Apple is already working on this.
    You can now host your own iChat server. Instant Messaging serves as a vital means of communication for organizations of all sizes, so it's useful to deploy and run your own private and secure IM server. Based on the open source Jabber project, the new iChat server in Tiger Server lets your company protect its internal communications by defining its own namespace, and use SSL/TLS encryption to ensure privacy. The iChat server works with both the iChat client in Mac OS X Tiger and popular open source clients available for Windows, Linux and even PDAs.
    http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/tiger/ [apple.com]

  • Some problems... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by samrolken ( 246301 ) <samrolken AT gmail DOT com> on Monday August 23, 2004 @06:18PM (#10050566)
    Yet, a context-sensitive text ad, just like those in Gmail, might prove to be both more valuable to advertisers and less obnoxious to users.
    If people were freaking out about context-sensitive text ads in their email, just imagine the reaction to the plan to "scan" IM messages for advertising.

  • They need to make it available over SSL! (443) (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TheCeltic ( 102319 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @06:25PM (#10050643) Homepage
    If they use SSL (https), just think how useful it would be to those of us that get blocked by corporate firewalls (from using non http/https ports).

  • Dear Google: (Score:3, Informative)

    by oldosadmin ( 759103 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @06:35PM (#10050750) Homepage
    Please do this!

    Thanks, Geeks everywhere

  • Joogle?

    I could understand GIM and a whole host of other possible names for such a service, but Joogle--"Jewish Google (or Googling for Jews)" just seems like one of those things that wouldn't pass the marketroid litmus test.

    I'd suggest Messoogle but then people might sign up thinking they'd be able to strike a conversation up with the Messiah.

  • Open standards and instant messaging (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Wise Dragon ( 71071 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @07:54PM (#10051406) Homepage
    Standard-based IM is all well and good for us, the technical elite. We don't want to run multiple IM clients to communicate with all of our friends. It's a nuisance, frankly. Have any of you used Yahoo Instant Messenger lately? They have a lot of new features that make it fun to use. IMvironments are cute little chat applets that allow for different, fun, styles of communication. So also does the ever expanding list of emoticons, translated to icons of course. Audibles are fun to play with, in a cartoonish way. Where is jabber? Still doing IRC-style communication in a window. Plain-jane, ho-hum, boring, boring, boring. Suitable for business, and I use it for that. I don't have the other instant messengers because nobody I care about uses them. No doubt there is a similar bells and whistles arms race going on on them. But where are the bells and whistles in jabber? My wife complains that I can't load an imvironment in GAIM.

    There's something to be said for changing the protocol and client at your whim to add fun and interesting modes of communication.

  • Not a good Idea (Score:5, Funny)

    by mmatloob ( 728476 ) on Monday August 23, 2004 @10:30PM (#10052496)
    A GIM (Google Instant Messenger) session
    Chat Session Google Ads

    A> Hello. Buy greeting cards!

    B> How much of Have us do your
    your homework homework for $5!!!
    Have you done?

    ...

  • Multiple Services in a Nice Little Package (Score:4, Insightful)

    by merikus ( 722704 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @12:50AM (#10053202)
    After reading a number of comments here, it seems many people (including myself) agree that the major problem GoogleIM faces is that if all your friends use ServiceX, you are basically forced to use ServiceX as well.

    The answer to this situation, IMHO, is for Google to release an IM program which has seamless integration with other IM services. This is offered in many third party IM applications, but a big Google brand on an application which could juggle multiple IM systems might just be enough to get people to use Google's application--which, of course, would require you to sign up for GoogleIM at download.

    It would be a slow process of conversion, but if Google starts out with seamless integration, I think they have a chance of converting a significant number of users within a year.

  • Google already has an instant messenger (Score:4, Informative)

    by ElliotLee ( 713376 ) on Tuesday August 24, 2004 @02:23AM (#10053606) Homepage Journal
    When they acquired Picasa, they also got Picasa Hello, which is now effectively Google Hello [googlehello.com].

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