So, Google Talk is all the buzz. Already, the geeky amongst us are scratching their heads and going, “So what?”
It’s a chat client. Big whoop. It doesn’t do anything any other chat client doesn’t already do. In fact, the only three things it does are IM, voice chat and hook into e-mail. And it’s so Google-y plain looking!
The only people you can talk to are other Google Talkers. Any geek knows that if you have more than one set of chatty friends on the internets, half are going to be on AIM, half are going to be on Yahoo, and half are going to be on MSN. You need something like Trillian to tie them all together.
However, I think you have to remember the target audience. It’s not the geeks. It’s the masses. Google is out to kill AIM, MSN and Yahoo. Does Google Talk do more than Trillian? No. Can you already IM, voice chat, and e-mail with all the others? Yes. But this thing is waaaaay easier to install, setup and use than any of them, and it’s a damn sight nicer to your PC than the clients from the big boys. All I had to do to start talking with Brian last night was click a button. No complicated mic setup. No IP addresses to configure. Just instant talk.
If I had to recommend a chat client for grandma*, this would be it.
Note: The “grandma” line has nothing to do with the fact that I also chatted with Michele, who’s turning 43 today. Really. *snicker*
I “LOVE” my google talk. it’s very clean looking, small, and everything is TEXT!
i hate it when things “convert” my text to smileys, google talk keeps the text smileys!
plus to bold all you have to do is surround the word by *astericks* and to italiciz by _underscores_. i miss the use of my astericks, but hopefully they’ll fix it.
also, it’s just in beta right now, if you read the “help” page it says “can you talk to non g-mail users using google talk” and they say “not yet, we’re working on it”
actually every feature you’d ever want says they’re working on it.
though if they do, i may just keep my beta version because all my im clients and my trillian are “cluttered” with features i don’t use! 🙂
The Trillian guys also need to step things up a bit and work out how to implement the complete feature sets of all the IM clients. It was diasppointing to find that I couldn’t use the voice feature of GoogleTalk in Trillian.
Interesting. I share a birthday with Michele.
Anyway, I’m up and running on Google Talk as well and I like it a lot. The audio quality is amazing and it’s uber simple to setup. Folks need to keep in mind that this is just the beginning. Here’s what the folks at Download Squad had to say about that:
Sounds like they might have a shot at getting all these different IMs to work together. Even if the talk fails Google Talk could still make use of the Jabber Gateways that provide access to other IM networks.