Google Instant Messenger all Rumor

Jbravo writes "Search, blogging, maps, photos, email, and now a portal, Google has kept adding to their array of services. Is an instant messenger next for Google? Most recently Google has been said to be buying out a company called Meetroduction, LLC for their instant messenger Meetro. So, is it true? Is Google writing the check now? Well, after a chat with Paul Bragiel, CEO of Meetroduction, the word is not right now. He called the whole story 'rumors.'"

Comments

Rumors and denials

[Junior J. Junior III]

Denials are almost a sure sign that something is up. Rumors, I don't know. But every time a company denies something, it seems it's actually confirmed shortly thereafter.

Too many already

[ilyaaohell]

Any company trying to roll out yet another instant messenger would be making a mistake. There are already three uber-popular, incompatible networks, not to mention the handful of smaller protocols. None of them really offer anything that the others don't have. Enough is enough.

Re:Too many already

[A beautiful mind]

and IRC from 1988 still beats them hands down.

Re:Too many already

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Depends on the job you're doing. No webcams, voicechat, direct ims(read: pictures inside convos, great for screenshots), or any other 'rich' features

IRC is extendable enough that you can add it, and a few clients have tried in the past(VIRC), but theyre just not standardized enough to rely on.
Tis a shame too If someone made a nice client that actually offered these features it'd save me and my friends a lot of time/effort having to switch between irc/aim depending on what is needed. I of course prefer irc when possible, but if I have a screenshot in my buffer, I'd rather click direct connect and right click -> paste picture than open ms paint, paste, save to disk, /dcc send nick (path to one-off screenshot), delete screenshot.

As much as it would be cool...

[theotherlight]

we really don't need another IM program. I'll consider trying it, but I think the general IM'ing population won't want to change.

I'll change in a second -- and tell all of my friends to change -- if, somehow, it just blows everything else out of the water. This, however, seems unlikely.

"Rumours" is not a denial.

[Angostura]

.. It is, to use the old phrase "a non-denial denial".

If the guy had said "It's just rumours and there is absolutely no truth in it" that would be one thing. Just saying "it's a rumour" is the polite equivalent of "no comment".

I would imagine that Paul Bragiel and his company is quite enjoying the attention, so it's not in his interests to decisively quash these rumours, so he's left things a little ambiguous.

Google buying its technology?

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting that MS has to take a lot of flack here for using its "unfair" financial advantage to buy out companies for their tech (drawing comparisons to a vampire) whereas it has been perfectly okay for Google to do the same.

Re:Google buying its technology?

[sethadam1]

There's a perfectly good reason for that. Google has not used their purchases to smash their competitors out of existence. Take for example, Picasa. Used, publicized, integrated, and yet not accompanied by a huge push to take over that sector of the market. Or how about Gmail - beta pretty much forever, and then when it become open, there's no push to steal Hotmail or Yahoo customers. How about Blogger? There are APIs all over the place.

Google hasn't been "evil" with their purchases. In fact, pretty much everything they bought they starting giving away for free.

Re:Hello?

[Takumi2501]

From TFA:

Google already has an instant messenger. "Hello" is a product that they received along with Picasa.

Re:The future is Google

[thrillseeker]

a GoogleOS thin-client is not far off. Why? The things that most people do don't require even a 10th the functionality of Windows

Actually, many people are slowly finding they need 10 times the functionality that the Windows variants provide. That's why other OS's exist and will continue to exist. Realize that functionality can be measured in many ways - freedom isn't free, for one thing - it requires work, whether in a democracy or an effort to have free (from control by others) software.

Google is lead by people smart enough to recognize that Microsoft views them as a threat, and so, by fiat, Microsoft is a threat to Google. A world in which Google did not have to worry about loss of search effort (and hence loss of eyeballs to the advertising revenue they capture) to Microsoft or to others is a world in which Google makes more money. A weaker Microsoft that would have to make decisions on concentrating its resources on its bread-and-butter Office (threatened by OpenOffice, for one), and on its OS, which is its starting point for its huge market capitalization, is a world in which Microsoft is not gaining revenue from search, or from IM, etc.

IMO, Google could do far worse than to figure out how to make Firefox even more useful and how to make Gaim even more useful, and how to make Sunbird a useful product, and how to make a free Exchange-like product that tied 'em all together, and acted as a chat server, and so on, and to give those things away, and encourage their use. Less Microsoft presence in those areas means a retrenched Microsoft not dipping into the search engine advertising revenue stream.

Re:The future is Google

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Actually, many people are slowly finding they need 10 times the functionality that the Windows variants provide.

No. geeks may be "slowly finding" this, but the "average user" is not. The "average user" has and continues to have a very well defined profile of things that they do. Games, image management, email, IM. The "average user" has no clue about much of what is discussed at Slashdot, and even less interest.