Google Mixes Chat Peanut Butter With Email Chocolate
from the and-gets-what-exactly? dept
It seems that just about everyone is discussing Google's latest move to embed its chat functionality directly into its Gmail offering. While we were trashed left and right in the comments for suggesting that the original Google Talk product lacked a lot of the "wow" factor we had come to expect from Google launches, Google Talk has failed to gain much of a following so far. That does not mean (and we never intended to imply that it would) that the company won't continue to innovate and (maybe) eventually get the formula right. Integrating it directly into Gmail is an interesting move, but probably not enough on its own. If Google really wanted to make a splash, why not go even further and figure out a way to get it to work with all of the various IM platforms out there? While Google Talk does work with some lesser known IM systems and (eventually) will work with AIM, Google is in a strong enough position that they could simply copy startup Meebo and offer more complete web-based integration of various IM clients. That move would suddenly get a lot more interest in the product, since it would be more than "yet another IM offering." It would obviously upset some of the other IM players, but whoever said that was a problem?
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Surreal
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They could, but they can't
Google could turn on the necessary transports to get gtalk to interoperate with MSN, Yahoo, ICQ/AIM et al tomorrow - but they won't, for two reasons:
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communication
I use GAIM at the moment. It rocks. I can talk to MSN and Y! users with no effort. Sadly no Gtalk support there just yet.
I don't use Skype because the IM facility sucks and I type more than I talk to folks
If one of these players can come up with a combined VoIP solution that lets me communicate seamlessly with the others... I'd pay for the damn thing (I don't want adverts) or I'll go for the one that has the highest traction with the users I communicate most with... and hands down at the moment it's MSN
While it's great to see Google blurring the boundries between mail and chat (something that I think will be productive, and also help procude more coherent logs) unless there are open system so an Outlook user or a Gmail user or an MS-LiveMail user can IM with a jabber user or call a SIP user... it's just going to be more pain for folks
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Chat, Google, and the little engine that could...
Email is lingua franca for communications in business and, to some extent personal use. Email is used for paper trails, appointment reminders, save-able long-term-multi-user “conversations”, and lots more. I can’t think of a day in my work for the last decade that hasn’t included email as an important component.
Google has arguably been good for innovation (have *you* tried Google Earth?). They’re fostering ideas and free thinking. Perhaps Google’s IM and email thing isn’t knock-your-socks-off (yet)… just give them time. I believe they’ll innovate in such a way as to take the essence of real-time conversation and combine it with archive-able communication in a big way.
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Re: communication
Though indeed GAIM does not yet have the VOIP support (it is being worked on, if I understand things correctly), GTalk text-chatting is easily done in GAIM.
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Transports are open, not directly, but still...
Not that I usually talk to a lot of people on AIM, but still, I like the clean interface of GTalk better.
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No Subject Given
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Re: communication
Sadly no Gtalk support there just yet.
Au contraire:
http://www.google.com/support/talk/bin/answer.py?answer=24073
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Re: Surreal
I lol'd. Thanks for that.
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Re: Surreal
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No Subject Given
If Google had been smart, they would have just gotten out the checkbook and bought Cerulean Studios and let Trillian exist independently.
Since they didn't do that, I would suggest that they focus on connecting IM and SMS. If GTalk could tell when the Google user was offline and direct IM's to the user's cell phone SMS and also handle the responses via SMS, I would be impressed.
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Google Talk IS lame
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Re: No Subject Given
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Gtalk/Jabber is going to change things
The jabber protocol is just getting solid. This is the modern version of SMTP. My operating company is deploying secure internal Jabber with secured server to server communications to Gtalk. Once Gtalk adds AIM, the question will be whether Yahoo and MSN can really hold out against the building strength of smtp style distributed IM that interoperates with AOL/ICQ/Gtalk. Anyone else who wants to run thier own IM server (and can give their home or enterprise users direct access to both MSN and Yahoo via local distributed transports - not transports run by Google) will create a powerful and server oriented environment that works a lot like email. Bang routing will die pretty quickly as it did in the early 1990s and soon we'll all have two IM accounts - one associated with our work email and one associated with our home email.
Feel free to IM me on jabber from Gtalk or another jabber server to my email address - hoffmang at hoffmang dot com.
-Gene
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Nigeria
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