Decius wrote:

They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free. Google Talk enables you to call or send instant messages to your friends for free–anytime, anywhere in the world.

Google reinvents another wheel. They seem to be doing a lot of that. This particular wheel, however, is rather plumbed. If anyone actually tries this thing and can tell me what, if anything, is new about it, I'm curious.

The only point I've heard so far is that it uses Jabber. Hrm... See, the reality is that due to a number of decisions that various players have made, the actual standard for IM is, in fact, AIM. This is not the best outcome in the world, as AIM is not an open standard, but it is a standard. I would prefer that Jabber were the standard, but I'm not going to switch to using something that can't communicate with a number of my friends simply because I've got a chip on my sholder about standards, or because I think Google is cool.

Use Adium or Trillian and use both at the same time.

terratogen wrote:
Use Adium or Trillian and use both at the same time.

My cellphone doesn't run Trillian.

Decius wrote:

terratogen wrote:
Use Adium or Trillian and use both at the same time.

My cellphone doesn't run Trillian.

It might run TipicME
or AgileMessenger
Although I've heard AgileMessenger can connect to jabber, it doesn't say so on the website.

Decius wrote:

They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free. Google Talk enables you to call or send instant messages to your friends for free–anytime, anywhere in the world.

Google reinvents another wheel. They seem to be doing a lot of that. This particular wheel, however, is rather plumbed. If anyone actually tries this thing and can tell me what, if anything, is new about it, I'm curious.

The only point I've heard so far is that it uses Jabber. Hrm... See, the reality is that due to a number of decisions that various players have made, the actual standard for IM is, in fact, AIM. This is not the best outcome in the world, as AIM is not an open standard, but it is a standard. I would prefer that Jabber were the standard, but I'm not going to switch to using something that can't communicate with a number of my friends simply because I've got a chip on my sholder about standards, or because I think Google is cool.

There's no "switch" ... there are a number of good multiprotocol clients out there. I can be reached on jabber, btw, as
bucy -at- club.cc dot cmu.edu.
gloop.org will be getting its own one of these days...

Decius wrote:

They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free. Google Talk enables you to call or send instant messages to your friends for free–anytime, anywhere in the world.

Google reinvents another wheel. They seem to be doing a lot of that. This particular wheel, however, is rather plumbed. If anyone actually tries this thing and can tell me what, if anything, is new about it, I'm curious.

The only point I've heard so far is that it uses Jabber. Hrm... See, the reality is that due to a number of decisions that various players have made, the actual standard for IM is, in fact, AIM. This is not the best outcome in the world, as AIM is not an open standard, but it is a standard. I would prefer that Jabber were the standard, but I'm not going to switch to using something that can't communicate with a number of my friends simply because I've got a chip on my sholder about standards, or because I think Google is cool.

Google created yet another nice simple interface.

The VOIP technology they use is awesome.

However, the problem is that it doesn't work with ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, and MSN. Google might be cool, but I agree - there's no reason to use their IM client if I can't use it to talk to my friends on IM.