Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Continuing its rapid expansion into new product categories, the Internet search giant plans to launch an instant messaging program called Google Talk as early as Wednesday, according to people familiar with the service.
Full article on LA Times [latimes.com]
The concept of serving contextual ads based on the topic of the conversation is also quite intriguing.
This part is especially interesting to those following presence and VoIP markets:-
According to a person who has seen the service, Google plans to let users chat using more than just their keyboards. Like similar programs from competitors, Google Talk also will let computer users with a headset have voice conversations with other computer users with headsets, this person said.
It seems to me that Google are battling for desktop space here. The internet is getting ever closer to the desktop, and the dekstop is where you need your ads.
Yup , I thought they would have a way to chat with aol/yahoo/msn users .That would be a great WOW factor!
And can you imagine the devastation to the telco industry if Google started offering free phone calls... ouch.
I thought that is what the webmaster world conference late night dinners were for...
i just got done doing a voice chat from illinois to california, and i have to say this really rocks, the sound quality was better than my cell phone, both of us chatting are experienced musicians and we both just couldnt believe
how good the quality was, in fact google talk, found the built-in mic on my laptop and used it for me to talk. had this laptop for a few years and didnt even know it had a built in mic, yahoo always made me hook a mic up...
i didnt see one ad at all during our short chat, even at first when i was typing replies to his voice (lol him hearing me type was what brought me to realize the built-in mic.) with the little box that it is running in a cant really see where they can put a full adsense ad in, maybe the rss ads would work well....
overall im pretty impressed by this, you can even "step" all over each others transmission, no waiting for one person to stop talking so the other can talk...
way to go google
[news.bbc.co.uk...]
AOL, MSN and Yahoo try to ensure that their users talk to no others simply because they fear that opening up their networks will dilute their hold and reduce the amount of cash they can generate from all these people.
By contrast, Google Talk is based on an open technology called Jabber which was created to help different networks talk to each other.
Retrieved from "wikipedia"
[edited by: engine at 4:10 pm (utc) on Aug. 25, 2005]
[edit reason] See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]
Google: let people talk on Web pages. Let them talk and VoIP wherever they meet. Have a look at Virtual Presence like <snip> while you develop your IM service. The Jabber Virtual Presence Project is the right thing for you. And while there are already millions of IM and VoIP users in other systems, Virtual Presence is a service where Google can be the first big player, if they jump on it quickly.
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 4:30 pm (utc) on Aug. 25, 2005]
[edit reason] please no tool urls [/edit]
I always wondered what they meant by "broad match" in AdWords.
ROTFL!
Did you mean: Find a broad
:)
A) they all got gmail addresses to try it out.
B) they still like MSN messager better "Only cuz of the dorky animated emoticons though". Others agreed.
I would say that for all the neat stuff people try to add to things, it is still the little things that get people.
I doubt they will add graphical emoticons.
Then I doubt they will succeed.
Microsoft had their operating system then came along the rest of the windows "package" Media Player, IE, whatever, you name it effectively getting rid of competitors by giving it all away free.
Google was just a search engine now there's GMail, Talk, Earth...
Just a thought...
There is no reason we need display pictures or smilies. No reason to ever change the font. I think names would be ok, but don't clutter the interface with that other stuff. Who needs to show emotions through smilies when you can just click call?
Google should move towards making this "better than your phone company", rather than making this "better than AIM". Thats where the huge growth will be.
Sorry Skype, but I hope you don't get squeezed out by the giant.
There is no reason we need display pictures or smilies. No reason to ever change the font.
Of course not, but that's not the point. There's no reason to buy an ipod cozy in the shape of an animal or put annoying sounds on your cell phone either. The point is that mainstream likes doing that. If you don't have it, mainstream will just use whatever does. IM is a very personal thing, and people want to define themselves while using it. You can give them the most interesting features in the world and if they can't make it their space (and that is what they are doing with the smilies and fonts) they will not want to be there.
What's wrong with :) and :¦ amd :(? People were plenty happy with them long before they got turned into pictures.
Maybe this is part of Google's philanthropic efforts to revitalize ASCII art?
I'm tempted to sign up now just because it does NOT have emoticons.
The current client is lacking hard core. The gmail notifier that is built in doesn’t change the color of the icon in the system tray never changes when you get new mail. You need to hover over it, even then sometimes you need to say, check mail. Like it doesn’t do it every minute like the real gmail notifier did. I would recommend Google buying Trillian as well. Make that free for all. No one wants more then two IM clients! Either combine the IM in the background or in the client. Background combining would cool a super wow factor. Hopefully the AOL/Google relationship allows Google the ability to negotiate integrations with AIM servers. MSN servers may never happen, so that is why buying Trillian would be smart move, plus all those neat skins. However Trillian has liability, it trespasses on other networks and if a bigger company owned that app I am sure that company would be a target for a suit by one of the proprietary IM networks.
Case in point: I do consulting for a dot.com company; a narrow slice of its product portfolio touches upon e-mail. You wanna guess what the *NUMBER ONE* term folks search for in the firm's knowledgebase? [email] "Signatures." The company also gets tons of requests to add custom emoticons, more color options, etc. And mind you, the firm's core offerings are more of a utility sort of thing than entertainment!
On a related note, a very sharp and tech-savvy colleague of mine at that company told me he's not planning on switching to trillian for his instant messenger. Why? He likes the "fun smilies" in MSN. I almost lost it.
I'm one of those folks who never understood why on earth people would pay for ring tones (much less ring-back tones!), why folks dote on the stylishness of a freakin' portable music player (whatever happened to music sound quality, warranty, feature set...?), and so on. In a nutshell, I'm disdainful of a lot of popular "culture," but I know it's folly to fight the masses.
So, yeah, I'm betting that Google isn't gonna MySpace up their baby with garish colors and blinking lights and all that junk, but I'd be shocked if they didn't create an easy infrastructure (skinnability, etc.) for others to do so.
dorky animated icons
Of course they'll also be competing with other IM progs, but this service, like Skype, is mainly directed to people who want to talk, not type.
If they develop this to be able to communicate with other networks, I can see it being a success.
Sykpe doesn't have this
Yeah, but I don't see skype burning through the masses yet either.
The talk thing may not go over well yet with the mainstream crowd yet either. Again, it is more of a personal space thing, IMO. I mean, it's not too hard to set a cell phone up to just talk out into the air and have the person talkback like on a speaker phone, but many people prefer using a headset or the handset anyway.
In the thread on the other board, only one person mentioned the talk part and only as she uses it as an intercom system for her boyfriend working on his computer in another room.
While conference/speaker phones are pretty standard in offices, the majority of people either don't like to use them or have never used them, so I just don't think they will be comfortable using the Talk part of this.
Beyond that, how hard will it be for MSN to intigrate the same feature into messenger? And they have the dorky smilies.
And one more point beyond that, the teen/young adult population in the US has been shown to really like texting and IMing. They have actually nearly developed a second language (literally) around doing it, with the shorthand and slang that they use. I was listening to a report about it a few weeks ago (I'll see if I can rack my brains to remember where). Texting and IMing is becoming part of the teen generation's identity. If they like to text better than calling their friends on the phone (that they happen to be texting on), why will they give up their IM to talk out loud?
See, the point of IM is that you can be intimate without being "intimate". It's just words on a screen. Flirting, joking talking with complete strangers can happen without any real intimacy (intamacy in the sense of a personal relationship, not a sexual one). It makes IMing fun and emotionally safe for most people.
If google is aiming for the business market, this is okay (not great but okay). You might get some companies that will adopt it for internal use, but I don't think that right now in it's going to fly much after the initial curiosity wears off.
