Sourabh’s blog

After all the speculations and rumours that had been going around in the tech-world about Google entering the IM arena, its not too much of a surprise when Google entered this sphere of the Internet early this morning. Many would agree like me that this was on the cards and always bound to happen some time in the near future. Over the last one year, Google has really come of age with its new, revolutionary and vast range of services like a whooping free 2Gb of email space through Gmail, maps, shopping information, news, desktop search, and now IM and VoIP. And more aptly the service has been named Google Talk.

Brief Lookup:

The installation file of the Google Talk is a mere 900 Kb and can be downloaded from here. The new IM is based on the Jabber/XMPP protocol. Currently the new IM has native support only for Windows users. But since its based on the Jabber/XMPP protocol- GAIM, Trillian, iChat, Adium and Psi can be used to connect to the new network. However the Voice chat services would for now be natively only for the Windows users. The Gmail Id and Password are used to sign in the the Google Talk Beta.

Installation and Interface:

The installtion of Google Talk doesnt take anything more than a few seconds. The OS supported are from Win2k onwards as a result those stuck with Windows 98 wouldn’t be fortunate enough to try this new Instant Manager. The Google Talk beta interface is very clean, sleek and appealing for starters. The very first thing that I noticed with the Interface was it wasnt bloated with features and advertisements. The interface has no ads, stock ticker, news info, weather info, even links to allied Google services. The Messenger in its first beta installment is pretty much low on features and provides only text/voice chat services. Google Talk beta does not include emoticons (unlike Yahoo and MSN Messenger), video or file transfer support, conference and smileys as yet.

Here is a pic depicting the actual messenger Contact List. The Inbox, Settings and the Help tabs are seen at the top-right of the messenger window. The Add Friend tab is seen at the bottom right. The Whole color combination is the same typical Google style as seen in their search engine and other sites. Sadly the links in the Status cannot be linked to actually open the webpages as seen in the Y!M. You can also find a Search Contacts tab in here.

This is the status side bar seen to change the status. Besides the common status messages you can have custom status and other two features as seen below.

The in-comming voice calls and the actual voice chat menu showing the speaker and microphone volumes are as seen below.

Now lets talk about the actual Message window. Its a plain, simple and tiny little square window. It seriously lacks the feature to show whether the particular person is online or not. When you get a couple of messages to gether the message windows stack together and adjoint themselves.

The add a new contact to your list and approval to add are quite simple too.

Settings:

Lots of controls and settings can be found in the settings box. Here you can add people to your blocked list so they will not be able to contact you via Google Talk beta. You can also choose if you want Google Talk beta to launch at Windows startup or not, manage notifications (such as new Gmail email), and save your recent chat history. Due to the presence of an inbuily Gmail notifier which checks for new mails you no longer need the same and it gets uninstalled if you had it installed previously during the installtion.

Tweaks/Hidden features:

At first glace, the IM from the search engine biggie seemed to be plain same text mode and soon to be monotonous in looks due to no text formatting. However as yet, I have found *TEXT* to be displayed in bold as TEXT and _TEXT_ to be displayed as TEXT. So atleast there are ways to get Bold and Italics in our messages. I am quite sure that there may be many other hidden features which are not quite apparent to change the font color/enable smileys, and other formatting but only time will let them unreveal themselves. Or mebbe the following versions to this beta . would feature them.

Final Words:

So is Google Talk, Just another IM client? Probably yes in my opinion as of now. Lets accept that there is nothing great in it which sets it apart from other IM/VoIP Services. Apart from undistorted voice chats on a 64kbps connection there isnt anything to crib about. But the status and legacy which Google enjoys, no one can have second thoughts about the fact that ‘ Whatever they touch, would turn into Gold’ due to the kind of fan-following it enjoys. There is no doubt that if Google wants they can surely come up with a Instant Messenger client that can very well challenge the likes of Yahoo, Msn and AOL counterparts. Other thing to be looked out is, Whether its gonna be the same old story with the Google Messenger too - ‘ The Forever Beta’ strategy. To end it on a positive note, I would be very happy if the subsequent (ofcourse beta :p ) versions have smileys, Conference support, File transfers and I wont for sure not mind google ads, as they would benefit both the people using messenger and ofcouse Google. Only time will tell what we have in store and whats the possible future of Instant Messengers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 25th, 2005 at 12:22 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.