GAIM supports Google Talk

@jogego: Thanks! I appreciate the info.

Gtalk is not cool. Hope they'll improve on it since it's still beta.

I wrote this on the 6th of April, 2004

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Predicting a Google Messenger: Advice for Google

I am neither a business analyst nor a google insider, just a compulsive google user and a young student of e-business. Do I have the right to give advice to the internet's hottest company? No, but I will anyway. That's what bloggers do! My opinions will often be quite accurate, but then they might be wrong at other times, hence the comment section. So here's some advice for Google!
[list][li]Google is right to move into areas which put it into direct competitiion with portal sites such as Yahoo and MSN, because there is no other viable choice. Yahoo used to run their searches using google's infrastructure, now they have committed their own search engine. Microsoft, which owns MSN.com, intends to play a Netscape on Google by developing their own search technology and integrating it into the next major Windows version ("we will catch them", said Bill Gates about google).[/li][li]Therefore, GMail is a perfect plan announced at a perfect time. However, I do not think they really need to have started out by offering 1gb storage. They probably should have started with a smaller number (50mb? 200mb?) which would still have seemed enormous to free e-mail users, and gradually increased the space they offer over time, making waves each time they do so. Anything above 50mb hurts other free e-mail providers; anything above 50mb hurts paid e-mail providers and even some web hosts! Did google really need to start with the vaporware practice at this time? I think not! Google needs not have made people realise that gmail is real before it was ready to start signing people up.[/li][li]Now the next thing is this: google needs to provide a messaging service for its gmail account holders. How hard is this? The answer is, not hard at all. Google just needs to set up an extremely scalable, distributed Jabber server and configure it to use the same user authentication database as gmail. Google might also want to configure a free Jabber client for gmail users (Google Messenger?), and figure out if it needs to serve contextual ads in the chat client. The advantage of using Jabber is that Jabber is an Open standard, so gmail users can chat with those who use jabber accounts on other domains. Plus, there are ready-made solutions for connecting Jabber networks with proprietary IM networks.[/li][li]Google is wrong to drop the Google Directory, based on the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org) from the home page, without offering a replacement. Google's 'similar pages' feature doesn't work as accurately as finding other links in the same Open Directory category. It has always been nice to be able to conduct a search and go straight to the Directory category that is most closely related to the search.[/li][li]In the same vein, I believe that Google is absolutely wrong to put Froogle on the home page. There's no such thing as "objective product search"(aka Froogle). Besides, Froogle is at the time of this posting still marked "BETA". Or what do you think?[/li][/list]

Googlescape, GOOGLE!, GBay, Googlesoft is a really hilarious web page that talks about 4 possible directions for the future of google, parodied after Netscape, Yahoo!, EBay and Microsoft.

Seun, the link you provided leads to a message of "page not found"

Corrected. Thanks for noticing it!

Today's Google is just like GBay:
"Google achieves platform-style success, spawning a new industry where [b]millions of bloggers depend on its ad placement servic[/b]e as their primary source of income. Google becomes the second most recognizable brand after Coke. "I'm feeling lucky" becomes a national catchphrase. Rivals complain that Google squeezes out competition, but no one seems to care. The courts begin to hold the company liable for all sorts of wayward transactions."

UPDATE: You can now chat from within Gmail.

Gmail excellent, Gmail chat

What's bad about Gmail chat?

Do dey have mobile services like mig33. For mobile phone users?

Google Talk is all hype.I don't see it competing for the market share with yahoo.

I like it because it's lightweight. It's nice. It's not something to spend millions of dollars building, or a major revenue earner, but it's invaluable for the few people that'll use it. I can't do without Gtalk. And it's fully encrypted, too!

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