Google, Skype and the Future of IM

Matt Veenstra sent in a nice little piece of rumor mongering about how Google's new Talk/Jabber/IM thing is just a stepping stone, but it's really just a foreshadowing of their future buyout of Skype. Worth some thought anyway.

Comments

Well, yeah.

[Ieshan]

If you send email to someone on gmail, or you IM someone who's using Google-Talk, sure, Google could have a copy of that.

But lets be realistic. Google probably doesn't want any information about *you*, they probably want to *aggregate information*, which is what they've been doing all along.

This is all an extension of search. Through all the "omg", "lol", and "haha"s in Instant Messenger, there's thousands of words that can be associated with both each other and with other links. There's thousands of white-listed and black-listed participants, because people naturally filter their conversations. They don't want a database about *you*, they want a relational database about *communication*, to make it easier to find out what someone means when they type something like "river bank" or "white house".

It's all about relationships between language. Conversation is a natural extension. They provide a service, they get tons of data.

At least, this is what I would be doing with the data. Google might not be doing that.

Re:Why would they buyout Skype?

[TheRaven64]

From what I have read, the Skype system works by using non-NAT'd people as relays for conversations where both end-points are NAT'd. This, unfortunately, is placing a lot of strain on their system as NAT'd people start to greatly outnumber non-NAT'd people. Of course, if we all had IPv6, this wouldn't be a problem.