Google Talk Available Early 897
smash writes "Google's new IM service is already live. All you need is a Jabber-compatible Instant Messaging client (such as Apple's iChat, or gaim), and a GMail address." This should answer, at least in part, all of the speculation that has been flying around the net over the last couple of days. Update: Many users have been eager to let us know that Google Talk in indeed live.
Gmail (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not a full fledged messaging program (Score:3, Interesting)
This is basically just google providing a public jabber server. I haven't gotten around to setting one up for myself, but have wanted to use a high quality, highly available, reliable jabber server to stick an account on. Now that google is doing it - I absolutely will.
This is exactly what I said they should do in the first place. Hurray!
can't get on (Score:2, Interesting)
Great News! (Score:3, Interesting)
Made Clear? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not a full fledged messaging program (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not a full fledged messaging program (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:ugh, throw it on the heap... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a bit of a toss-up
The only thing I can think of, since it uses your gmail account as a login, is integration with your gmail address book -- but then yahoo and MS chat services do the same thing with their mail services, and that didn't exactly change my life.
Re:AIM/MSN still owns the market (Score:3, Interesting)
In europe MSN is pretty much king and yahoo second. Almost no one uses AIM.
And which architecture was designed with the ability and the intention to bridge to those existing services?
Right - only Jabber.
Microsoft gets a bit of its own poison - embraced and extended by an open standard.
What about Hello? (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone know if Hello will work with Google Talk? I don't feel like having to run Hello and Google Talk. However, if they do both work together, what would be the point of Google having both Hello and Google Talk?
Works with tor, yeehaw! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:OK (Score:3, Interesting)
They could make a google branded open office.
Will they buy oracle? No 'cause its not open source.
Re:Gmail (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't get it. Why couldn't a spammer beg for an account like everyone else? Once they get in, they get 50 invites and create 50 more accounts (and repeat). I suppose they could track who invited whom and watching the parents and children of known spam accounts.
Re:Now spy on your friends! (Score:5, Interesting)
Conference Rooms? (Score:4, Interesting)
GoogleTalk + Dark Fibre = Internet Phone System (Score:5, Interesting)
Bee-bee-boo-boop "Picard to all phone companies: You are being replaced."
Working via Trillian Pro (Score:2, Interesting)
Help me out here... why Jabber? (Score:3, Interesting)
Granted all this. But speaking as someone who's just running a client, why should I care? Aside from the secure connection, will chatting on Jabber be much different for me than chatting on Yahoo or AOL or ICQ?
With GMail, there's a web-based client which has a lot of whiz-bang features that clearly distinguish it from AOL Webmail or Yahoo Mail. But I need a chat client to connect anyway, and it's the client's features that impress me, not the protocol.
Hmm, perhaps I just answered my own question.
Re:ugh, throw it on the heap... (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Now where is group search? (Score:2, Interesting)
This (may) sucks (Score:5, Interesting)
Another thing some people might have noticed is that reverse DNS for talk.google.com is toolbar.google.com. Now have a look at JEP0151 [jabber.org].
Re:Gmail (Score:5, Interesting)
Client Already Exists (Score:2, Interesting)
The folks over at Download Squad have a copy. Read the review: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2005/08/23/googe-tal
Now I'm just hoping we all get a copy damn soon.
Re:ugh, throw it on the heap... (Score:1, Interesting)
Email has a different background as it wasn't developed for commercial purposes originally whereas IM is really about serving ads to as large a userbase as possible and getting said userbase through features and established userbase.
Re:Gmail (Score:3, Interesting)
Done! And if anyone else wants one, reply to this thread, too.
I, for once, welcome our new Google overlords! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:GoogleTalk + Dark Fibre = Internet Phone System (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine finding a way to know what people are going to be thinking about, talking about, asking for -- in advance.
Well?
You could, say, direct advertising to them based on what you knew, if you could do that.
Email, digitized voice, a huge networked universe of fast computers growing all the time.
The Internet sees Google as unthreatening, and uses Google as a preferred route.
Has anyone ever asked the folks who came up with "Don't Do Evil" what the other half of their statement is? It must have a corollary.
I suspect it's -- Be God.
clue to easter egg in client? "play wumpus game" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:clue to easter egg in client? "play wumpus game (Score:3, Interesting)
Google Talk Meme Effect (Flickr photos) (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smash/36648272/ [flickr.com]
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smash/36659424/in/ph
Re:Now where is group search? (Score:4, Interesting)
said Reid Hoffman, the founder of two Internet ventures, including LinkedIn, a business networking Web site popular among Silicon Valley's digerati. "It's largely that they're hiring up so many talented people, and the fact they're working on so many different things. It's harder for start-ups to do interesting stuff right now."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/24/technology/24val ley.html?pagewanted=2 [nytimes.com]
Re:Gmail (Score:5, Interesting)
The SVG part isn't important (I was never really clear why they picked this format over any other vector format...) but the idea was pretty cool. With yourself at the center you could see who was near you in the social structure of the network, and who they were closely associated with, etc.
I never used the service long or heavily enough to develop a very robust social network (and not enough of my friends used it to make a very good model of the real world) but this is not so with email. Practically everyone I know, with the exception of a few older or particularly Luddite relatives, I've emailed at one point or another.
It would be neat to have a program that scanned your email archives (with Gmail this wouldn't be too hard, since all mail is retained in the archive unless manually deleted) and constructed a social network from it. If I were going to design it, I'd make "closeness" be the frequency of emails, and the angular separation between two people who both talk to a third based on the number of shared keywords in their emails. That way you'd end up with all your business associates off in one direction (say all radiating away from you within a few degrees of each other) but your family, with whom you probably use few words in common with your business emails, in a different direction entirely.
If the program could scan people's emails recursively -- assuming they were all on Gmail and had suitably large archives of email -- you could create a pretty neat social model that would actually be reflective of the real world.
Of course, the privacy issues surrounding something like that would be gigantic. People get all creeped out by Gmail scanning emails and then presented targeted advertising...I doubt they'd tolerate a system that scanned all their archived email in order to produce a graphical model, even if it was semi-anonymous.
Re:Not a full fledged messaging program (Score:3, Interesting)
You're wrong to blame Google for it, though. All Google is doing is making the technology of surveillance more obvious. Your emails and IMs aren't, and never were, private. Unless you were using some form of end-to-end encryption, that is. But for the vast majority of people, that assumption of privacy, at least when it comes to the Internet, is just that: an assumption. And a very poor one at that.
Frankly, I like GMail. I think everyone ought to use it. Okay, not really. But I like that it makes people like my parents, who despite years of cautioning never gave a second thought about emailing someone their bank routing number or Amex-online account login, think twice about what they type in. You can rail all day to people about how email is really nothing more secure than a postcard, passed from machine to machine across the network, but that's all very abstract. The first time you notice how those GMail ads seem to eerily change depending upon what you're writing about, the whole thing becomes more clear.
Google isn't invading your privacy. It's just making you aware of the fact that you never had any.
Of course, people say, before Google existed and thousands of users' emails were archived and indexed, intercepting email was hard. Okay, point granted. But really how hard? Certainly not outside the reach of government agencies. If you're really afraid of the three-letter-guys, then everything Google does to drive the unencrypted=insecure link home to the average user is good.
Because the only privacy you'll get on the internet is the kind you create for yourself. The more users who realize this and the sooner they take steps to implement it, the better. When everyone starts actually encrypting their email and messaging, then we'll actually have some privacy for the government to try and invade.
Closed network (Score:5, Interesting)
According to the Google Talk developer page [google.com], Google is only planning pre-arranged peering with a set of providers. Their goal, it appears, is to reduce spam and other abuses by ensuring that all clients are connecting through trusted services.
While I see their point, it does seem like a bit of a cop out. "Service choice" doesn't really mean much unless I can choose to use my own service and still inter-operate. A truly open system should allow anyone to play, not just the big boys.
My top 5 things Google should do (Score:1, Interesting)
1: Not yet an ISP! - Give me WiFi, damnit!
*Reads This [slashdot.org] * "Good boy Google, now fetch"
2: Webpages - With the amount of storage they have for gmail, they could certainly fork up 50mb free webpage accounts by now, right? Just like with the mail, the average person probably wont use 50 megs, I'm sure that's what they'd count on. But it would be really interesting to see something like this happen with google. Oooh, what's this, searching [google.com] appears to imply it exists, dispite the fact that it links nowhere...
3: Coffee and TV - It's true you can search froogle for just about anything, and it's true google has a small merchandising [googlestore.com] department (appairently), but they don't have anything like...amazon.com as an example (all be it a rather poor one). I think you get the point...if your company makes something, they cant add it to a google store, and if you want something, you cant buy it through google. (again, froogle, I know, but it's just not the same).
4: A Better Blogger - What the hell is up with blogging everything these days? I mean...it's like a diary, except anyone has access to read it. Now, this was fine until one day you turn on the news and they're reading some random John Doe's opinion on the economy, and acting like it's important. *ahem* but anyways, Blogger. If they slapped the google name on blogger, and wrote just a tad bit of support into the client their Google Talk client right here (something really simple, like, link your gmail account to your blogger account, and then just a little link in the drop down menu) and I'd bet my Bawls [bawls.com] they'd see a sudden spike in blogger's popularity and it crushes other services as quickly as blogging crushed my hope in humanity.
5: Google Browser - a Gowser? I don't know what to call it, but it's an idea that I've seen google talk about as early as September 2001. Fork mozilla already! Just think about it though, how many of you have google as your start page? (or something that links to google in bright bold letters at the top of the page, such as this lovely one you're reading right now). If they've already made a messenger client and service, then they've clearly invested at least a reasonable amount of effort into software. It's not hard to imagine a massively google-customized fork of firefox, or mozilla, finding it's way onto my desktop, laptop, and PSP (once I get a good linux port running, emulating an x86 is too much of a round-about way of doing things for me). Of course, then someone would suggest they make a google media player, and they'd jump on the idea. And people would keep naming off apps they want google to make until one day they make a google kernel (goognel? or something...) and we have a complete google operating system running. I wish.
More importanlty, why did I stay up till 5 AM reading/posting on here? And when exactly in the night did I misplace my pants?
Re:Whats the point? (Score:1, Interesting)
Now, if google interacts correctly with other jabber servers, that's something else entirely. That means the central server disappears from the chat network. Which would be a dramatic change from the current situation, where you can't join an IM network as a server without permission from the IM network's owner.
Re:Now spy on your friends! (Score:2, Interesting)
What are they going to do with it?
All those things reveal not much, except that my interests are as broad as the universe (and occasionally larger, when I try to find stuff about something people call god).
They could send me more spam (gets me off their mail service), spim (gets me off their IM service) or more ads (gets me on more effective adblock measures). Until they're going to ask money, I'm going to keep using the services. When they do, I'm gonna be the first to leave.
There's no point in worrying for privacy in public places. When I change clothes in the middle of times square NY I'm not getting much privacy. Didn't I choose for that? Nonencrypted emails, websearches etc. do the same.
Re:Gmail (Score:1, Interesting)
https://mail.google.com/mail/a-a3a33267be-47baab5
https://mail.google.com/mail/a-a3a33267be-e6a2bca
https://mail.google.com/mail/a-a3a33267be-7b1a4db
https://mail.google.com/mail/a-a3a33267be-f802a75