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Google Talk Available Early
smash writes "Google's new IM service is already live. All you need is a Jabber-compatible Instant Messaging client (such as Apple's iChat, or gaim), and a GMail address." This should answer, at least in part, all of the speculation that has been flying around the net over the last couple of days. Update: Many users have been eager to let us know that Google Talk in indeed live.
Any word on when Gmail is going to go public? Last I heard google news was waiting because of it's inability to create revenue because they were using other peoples news or some such. But the mail portion has adds and the like, so I guess it is able to make revenue.
Um. Jabber is a full fledged messaging program.
This is basically just google providing a public jabber server. I haven't gotten around to setting one up for myself, but have wanted to use a high quality, highly available, reliable jabber server to stick an account on. Now that google is doing it - I absolutely will.
This is exactly what I said they should do in the first place. Hurray!
GAIM won't let me on, using me@gmail.com as a username, it seems to be trying to resolve me@gmail.com@talk.google.com and fecking it up. anyone have ideas?
www.gaian-mind.org - eco-punk/crust coop and collective | www.anarchistfederation.org - so cal anarchist federation
I'm very happy that this indicates they may be using the Jabber protocol for IM. I've been using it for my friends and family (I run my own Jabber server behind an OpenVPN network) for quite some time now and it's a much nicer protocl than any of the other ones out there. The main reason being that it's free/open. Plus, I don't need to change my chosen clients to talk to the rest of the world now since anyone who matters (to me) has a GMail account. Here's to Google making a wise choice yet again! :)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
The reasoning behind google sponsoring so many people to work on GAIM for summer of code? Maybe they will release a gaim based client?
I don't know. I'm not too excited about using as a chat server host a company that is known specifically for their data warehousing and searching and mining capabilities
Then this oughta give you the creeps.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
I wonder what google thinks they're going to add to chat services?
... google maps and gmail changed the whole landscape for those services, and I wouldn't have thought there was much to add there. Google groups and froogle, on the other hand, didn't change much of anything. I'm reserving judgement, because they're smarter than me and that seems safest.
It's a bit of a toss-up
The only thing I can think of, since it uses your gmail account as a login, is integration with your gmail address book -- but then yahoo and MS chat services do the same thing with their mail services, and that didn't exactly change my life.
Despite attempts at breaking into the instant messenging market, I believe AOL still rules the market, atleast here in the US. Yahoo, MSN, etc. didn't really decrease the market share of AIM. I doubt this Google IM thing will be any different.
In europe MSN is pretty much king and yahoo second. Almost no one uses AIM.
And which architecture was designed with the ability and the intention to bridge to those existing services?
Right - only Jabber.
Microsoft gets a bit of its own poison - embraced and extended by an open standard.
Does anyone know if Hello will work with Google Talk? I don't feel like having to run Hello and Google Talk. However, if they do both work together, what would be the point of Google having both Hello and Google Talk?
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
looks like it allows connections from tor servers. I love routing my IM's over tor to stop prying eyes. ;-)
Wasnt there mention of google making a Google branded version of firefox in the past? So thats possible.
They could make a google branded open office.
Will they buy oracle? No 'cause its not open source.
snowulf.com
Exactly! Google will now have a reocrd of: 1. Your web searches 2. Your email 3. You im conversations If google were the government would you be afraid?
Is there anyway to get a list of conference rooms on Google Talk?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Google Talk ... and all that dark fibre Goggle has been buying up? This isn't just about instant messenger - Google is building the next voice communications network! With their new WiFi hotspots - it could be wireless voice communications (at least if you're in a major center).
Bee-bee-boo-boop "Picard to all phone companies: You are being replaced."
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
I've got it working via Trillian Pro, and posted the details here: here. Works great, but nothing to get excited about. Right now it looks and acts like a standard Jabber server. I'm more interested to see if they'll include connectors for the other IM networks (I suspect they will) and what the Google Talk client looks like. With multi-network support, a no-nonsense UI (while most IM programs are nonsense-full), and voice chat (or better yet, VoIP) support -- Google Talk will rock.
What does that tag cloud look like? http://www.jeffhester.net/
I understand that (a) Jabber is XML and open protocol and all that, and (b) anyone can install a Jabber server, and (c) Jabber provides secure connections to said server, in Google's case by default.
Granted all this. But speaking as someone who's just running a client, why should I care? Aside from the secure connection, will chatting on Jabber be much different for me than chatting on Yahoo or AOL or ICQ?
With GMail, there's a web-based client which has a lot of whiz-bang features that clearly distinguish it from AOL Webmail or Yahoo Mail. But I need a chat client to connect anyway, and it's the client's features that impress me, not the protocol.
Hmm, perhaps I just answered my own question.
True, but that doesn't actually protect your conversations from Google. People connected between your Internet connection and Google's server won't be able to monitor your conversations, but Google itself will, which is just as undesirable. Another reply has already mentioned Off-The-Record Messaging, a good solution for existing systems.
Signature.
Hey, now there's a service I'd like to see from Google: search web sites from the future. That would put an end to all of this tiring speculation on what new service they'll think up next.
Come to think of it, they could incorporate the technology into other parts of the side. Why present a list of results when you can search the future logs to find out which result I'm going to click and take me straight there.
That would create a paradox, it would click a link because in the future you were to click that link, but since it clicked that link for you, you couldn't have clicked the link, and the information it used to determine which link to click couldn't possibly have existed, so we're screwed.
Just wait until the standards are updated, when verison 2.0 of the future comes out, then you'll be able to do this.
We could use a group search feature. If we all are talking via IM why not let one person search and have everyone access the results?
Another thing some people might have noticed is that reverse DNS for talk.google.com is toolbar.google.com. Now have a look at JEP0151.
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
Apparently a Google Talk client already exists:
k -review/.
The folks over at Download Squad have a copy. Read the review: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2005/08/23/googe-tal
Now I'm just hoping we all get a copy damn soon.
That's why I use a client like Trillian. I can talk to anyone on most any service and switch to a native client if need be. That said, it would be nice to have 1 ID, but it's not really an issue for me.
Email has a different background as it wasn't developed for commercial purposes originally whereas IM is really about serving ads to as large a userbase as possible and getting said userbase through features and established userbase.
Hey, at least, they don't use a proprietary protocol to talk to us :P
Cesar Cardoso can be found at cesar at zyakannazio dot eti dot br (or at least I believe so)
In the Google Talk client, in the icon tray, select About. Notice on the bottom light grey characters on the which background. They read: "play 23 21 13 16 21 19 7 1 13 5" Using a=1, z=26, it translates to: "play wumpus game" Not sure what to do with it, just thought it was interesting that it was there. Investigating...
from Wikipedia "wumpus": Hunt the Wumpus was an important early computer game. It was based on a simple hide-and-seek format, featuring a mysterious monster (the Wumpus) that lurked deep inside a network of rooms. Using a command line text interface, the player would enter commands to move through the rooms, or shoot arrows along crooked paths through several adjoining rooms. There were twenty rooms, each connecting to three others, arranged like the vertices of a dodecahedron (or the faces of an icosahedron). Hazards included bottomless pits, super bats (which would drop the player in a random location) and the Wumpus itself. When the player had deduced from hints which chamber the Wumpus was in without entering it, he would fire an arrow into the Wumpus' chamber to slay it. However, firing the arrow into the wrong chamber would startle the Wumpus, which might then devour the player. [...] Versions of Hunt the Wumpus are currently available all over the Internet, for almost all operating systems and machines, including Linux, Palm Pilot handheld computers, and mobile phones. The first bot on IRC was a multiplayer Hunt the Wumpus game, in which firing an arrow into a room with other players caused another player to be killed: "Foo is hit in the back with an arrow!" Unfortunately, the "Wumpus-o-Matic" player never made it off the drawing board. See also Rog-O-Matic. Wumpus have also made an appearance in the TCG Magic: The Gathering, specifically in the 1999 Mercadian Masques expansion. They appear mainly in the art for green cards in the set, though two are playable creatures: the appropriately named Hunted Wumpus, and also Thrashing Wumpus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wumpus
This is what happened to the guy who spread the news early on:o tostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smash/36648272/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smash/36659424/in/ph
Simpy
You're right to be concerned.
You're wrong to blame Google for it, though. All Google is doing is making the technology of surveillance more obvious. Your emails and IMs aren't, and never were, private. Unless you were using some form of end-to-end encryption, that is. But for the vast majority of people, that assumption of privacy, at least when it comes to the Internet, is just that: an assumption. And a very poor one at that.
Frankly, I like GMail. I think everyone ought to use it. Okay, not really. But I like that it makes people like my parents, who despite years of cautioning never gave a second thought about emailing someone their bank routing number or Amex-online account login, think twice about what they type in. You can rail all day to people about how email is really nothing more secure than a postcard, passed from machine to machine across the network, but that's all very abstract. The first time you notice how those GMail ads seem to eerily change depending upon what you're writing about, the whole thing becomes more clear.
Google isn't invading your privacy. It's just making you aware of the fact that you never had any.
Of course, people say, before Google existed and thousands of users' emails were archived and indexed, intercepting email was hard. Okay, point granted. But really how hard? Certainly not outside the reach of government agencies. If you're really afraid of the three-letter-guys, then everything Google does to drive the unencrypted=insecure link home to the average user is good.
Because the only privacy you'll get on the internet is the kind you create for yourself. The more users who realize this and the sooner they take steps to implement it, the better. When everyone starts actually encrypting their email and messaging, then we'll actually have some privacy for the government to try and invade.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
According to the Google Talk developer page, Google is only planning pre-arranged peering with a set of providers. Their goal, it appears, is to reduce spam and other abuses by ensuring that all clients are connecting through trusted services.
While I see their point, it does seem like a bit of a cop out. "Service choice" doesn't really mean much unless I can choose to use my own service and still inter-operate. A truly open system should allow anyone to play, not just the big boys.
It would be interesting to make a list of what basic (computer related) services Google DOESNT provide yet.
1: Not yet an ISP! - Give me WiFi, damnit!
*Reads This * "Good boy Google, now fetch"
2: Webpages - With the amount of storage they have for gmail, they could certainly fork up 50mb free webpage accounts by now, right? Just like with the mail, the average person probably wont use 50 megs, I'm sure that's what they'd count on. But it would be really interesting to see something like this happen with google. Oooh, what's this, searching appears to imply it exists, dispite the fact that it links nowhere...
3: Coffee and TV - It's true you can search froogle for just about anything, and it's true google has a small merchandising department (appairently), but they don't have anything like...amazon.com as an example (all be it a rather poor one). I think you get the point...if your company makes something, they cant add it to a google store, and if you want something, you cant buy it through google. (again, froogle, I know, but it's just not the same).
4: A Better Blogger - What the hell is up with blogging everything these days? I mean...it's like a diary, except anyone has access to read it. Now, this was fine until one day you turn on the news and they're reading some random John Doe's opinion on the economy, and acting like it's important. *ahem* but anyways, Blogger. If they slapped the google name on blogger, and wrote just a tad bit of support into the client their Google Talk client right here (something really simple, like, link your gmail account to your blogger account, and then just a little link in the drop down menu) and I'd bet my Bawls they'd see a sudden spike in blogger's popularity and it crushes other services as quickly as blogging crushed my hope in humanity.
5: Google Browser - a Gowser? I don't know what to call it, but it's an idea that I've seen google talk about as early as September 2001. Fork mozilla already! Just think about it though, how many of you have google as your start page? (or something that links to google in bright bold letters at the top of the page, such as this lovely one you're reading right now). If they've already made a messenger client and service, then they've clearly invested at least a reasonable amount of effort into software. It's not hard to imagine a massively google-customized fork of firefox, or mozilla, finding it's way onto my desktop, laptop, and PSP (once I get a good linux port running, emulating an x86 is too much of a round-about way of doing things for me). Of course, then someone would suggest they make a google media player, and they'd jump on the idea. And people would keep naming off apps they want google to make until one day they make a google kernel (goognel? or something...) and we have a complete google operating system running. I wish.
More importanlty, why did I stay up till 5 AM reading/posting on here? And when exactly in the night did I misplace my pants?
What IM services can you not log into using third party clients? Heck, some services even document their protocol extensively (like AIM's TOC) to promote third party client support.
Now, if google interacts correctly with other jabber servers, that's something else entirely. That means the central server disappears from the chat network. Which would be a dramatic change from the current situation, where you can't join an IM network as a server without permission from the IM network's owner.
No.
What are they going to do with it?
All those things reveal not much, except that my interests are as broad as the universe (and occasionally larger, when I try to find stuff about something people call god).
They could send me more spam (gets me off their mail service), spim (gets me off their IM service) or more ads (gets me on more effective adblock measures). Until they're going to ask money, I'm going to keep using the services. When they do, I'm gonna be the first to leave.
There's no point in worrying for privacy in public places. When I change clothes in the middle of times square NY I'm not getting much privacy. Didn't I choose for that? Nonencrypted emails, websearches etc. do the same.