Yes, I’m a Google Talk fan

Mar 1, 2006 in General Discussions

I didn’t really know what to think at first. I signed up, added one person to my contact list, had one conversation, and stopped using it.
For one, I already had a jabber account (for work IM) and a personal MSN account, not to mention a throw back ICQ account from the old days.

I didn’t really see the need for yet another IM service, regardless of the technical advantages (or in the case of GoogleTalk’s initial release, the lack thereof). IMO Google missed the boat with me, it wasn’t until the integration with GMail that it became useful and actually pretty cool.

I’m a big fan of its relative simplicity and the centralized archival is a nice side benefit. What I’d love to see is someone attempt a decent (and long lived) federation across the existing IM services. It’s cool and all, but I can count the number of chat-enabled people on my contact list with one hand. I don’t know enough about the Jabber protocols/setup to know if its possible, but from a bit of reading it looks like there has been some effort put into it.

This post on BigBlueBall talks about using different transports to chat across the other services. It’s about a month old and looks to preceed the GMail/GTalk integration but it might still work. Unfortunately it sounds like the MSN transport isn’t the greatest…

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