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.

Comments

Gmail

[bobsacks]

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.

Re:Gmail

[_Splat]

Not exactly.. it's similar to how a bank doesn't have enough cash to pay out every account at once... they assume that most people will only use a small fraction of their space, and only allocate that much. If everyone decided to fill up their Gmail accounts all at once, there would be trouble.

Re:Gmail

[Kadin2048]

I've played around with a "social networking" site (thefacebook.com) which used to have -- and perhaps it's back now, I'm not sure -- a really neat feature. It would give you a zoomable 2-D representation of your social network as an SVG file.

The SVG part isn't important (I was never really clear why they picked this format over any other vector format...) but the idea was pretty cool. With yourself at the center you could see who was near you in the social structure of the network, and who they were closely associated with, etc.

I never used the service long or heavily enough to develop a very robust social network (and not enough of my friends used it to make a very good model of the real world) but this is not so with email. Practically everyone I know, with the exception of a few older or particularly Luddite relatives, I've emailed at one point or another.

It would be neat to have a program that scanned your email archives (with Gmail this wouldn't be too hard, since all mail is retained in the archive unless manually deleted) and constructed a social network from it. If I were going to design it, I'd make "closeness" be the frequency of emails, and the angular separation between two people who both talk to a third based on the number of shared keywords in their emails. That way you'd end up with all your business associates off in one direction (say all radiating away from you within a few degrees of each other) but your family, with whom you probably use few words in common with your business emails, in a different direction entirely.

If the program could scan people's emails recursively -- assuming they were all on Gmail and had suitably large archives of email -- you could create a pretty neat social model that would actually be reflective of the real world.

Of course, the privacy issues surrounding something like that would be gigantic. People get all creeped out by Gmail scanning emails and then presented targeted advertising...I doubt they'd tolerate a system that scanned all their archived email in order to produce a graphical model, even if it was semi-anonymous.

Re:Not a full fledged messaging program

[Seumas]

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!

Made Clear?

[Azarael]

The reasoning behind google sponsoring so many people to work on GAIM for summer of code? Maybe they will release a gaim based client?

Works with tor, yeehaw!

[mwilliamson]

looks like it allows connections from tor servers. I love routing my IM's over tor to stop prying eyes. ;-)

Re:Now spy on your friends!

[Indianwells]

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?

Conference Rooms?

[randomErr]

Is there anyway to get a list of conference rooms on Google Talk?

GoogleTalk + Dark Fibre = Internet Phone System

[Spinlock_1977]

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."

Re:GoogleTalk + Dark Fibre = Internet Phone System

[ankhank]

Did you ever read a story called "The Sources of the Nile" by Avram Davidson?

Imagine finding a way to know what people are going to be thinking about, talking about, asking for -- in advance.

Well?

You could, say, direct advertising to them based on what you knew, if you could do that.

Email, digitized voice, a huge networked universe of fast computers growing all the time.

The Internet sees Google as unthreatening, and uses Google as a preferred route.

Has anyone ever asked the folks who came up with "Don't Do Evil" what the other half of their statement is? It must have a corollary.

I suspect it's -- Be God.

Re:ugh, throw it on the heap...

[atomm1024]

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.

Re:Google tomorrow?

[Aeiri]

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.

This (may) sucks

[Krunch]

It looks like talk.google.com users can't talk to external Jabber users (like thoses using jabber.org for example). I really hope it's not a feature and that it will be fixed when they'll announce the new service. If it's not the case it's not that better than MSN, it's just leaving a monopoly for another one. Nice to see they use an open protocol but it would really sucks to have a closed Google Jabber network.

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.

Virtual presence on Web pages (also sometimes known as co-browsing, while co-browsing can also mean something different) makes people aware of each other, who are at the same Web location at the same time. The basic purpose of a virtual presence system is to show names, icons, and/or avatars of people who are on a page or a set of pages and to let them communicate.

clue to easter egg in client? "play wumpus game"

[sp1der]

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...

Re:clue to easter egg in client? "play wumpus game

[rappo]

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

Re:Now where is group search?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

"Google is doing more damage to innovation in the Valley right now than Microsoft ever did,"

said Reid Hoffman, the founder of two Internet ventures, including LinkedIn, a business networking Web site popular among Silicon Valley's digerati. "It's largely that they're hiring up so many talented people, and the fact they're working on so many different things. It's harder for start-ups to do interesting stuff right now."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/24/technology/24val ley.html?pagewanted=2

Closed network

[Nurgled]

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.