1. First of all, it’s VERY basic. I think they were rushing to get something out. They probably spent a lot of time developing the voice talk feature as that’s the part they are pushing the most.
2. I like that you can leave your own custom Online/Busy message.
3. I also like the format of how the chat looks when you’re talking. For instance, if I send 4 posts in a row before the person I’m chatting with responds, it looks like this –
Aaron: hiHow are you?
Google Talk is cool, huh?
It needs some work
Other IM clients would put Aaron: in front of every single line.
4. If you click on the top bar of the chat window, it shrinks it down to one line that will show the last post sent by the person you’re chatting with. Not 100% sure on the usefulness of this feature unless you chat with a ton of people at the same time and want to save window space.
5. It has GMail notifier built in, so you can uninstall your redundant GMail notifier.
6. Kind of stinks that it’s only available to GMail users. I’m sure some people won’t get it because they don’t want another e-mail account.
7. You can’t change the font of your text. I like this feature in MSN because it allows you to easily and quickly differentiate your text from the person’s text you’re chatting with. They said this improvement is coming soon.
8. If you minimize the chat window, the next time the person sends some text, it pops up as a notification above the system tray with the content of what they said. That means your chat is going to be seen by anyone that looks at your monitor, regardless of whether your chat window is behind something else. If this doesn’t get a fix of some sort, I think Google Talk is going to have a short life on my work PC (which is fine since we have SIP MSN Messenger with Live Communications Server at work.)
Overall, I think it’s basic and needs some work, but I have a feeling that updates are going to be posting like wildfire. Sorry, Matt, the Google Talk client doesn’t support Linux, but you can use other ones like GAIM (or iChat on your iBook) to chat with Google Talk users…
This post was brought to you by the Google Blogger Microsoft Word PlugIn (which screwed up my number formatting and doesn't allow images to be included.) :-)
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2 comments:
Totally man.. It needs some work big time. They rushed it on this one. I wouldn't have even installed it but I'm beginning to loosen my stance on Google (Google Earth rocks)
However I think the programmmers behind this app aren't very good. The gui sucks, talk about bland...they are lucky it says Google Beta!
The only thing they are offering that is really any different is the pc to pc calling....which Yahoo has had sometime now.
To make a successful IM client you need chat rooms..of course probably not the ones that Yahoo likes to advertise with.
I'm old fashioned from the IRC days when there are tons of rooms about anything and everything (How else do you think I passed Cobol class!)
#8 has to be my biggest pet peeve. You are in a meeting with the previously stated SIP Messenger, and it happens to be around 8am...just when the whole company signs onto their laptops! John, Joe, Mary, Sam, Ron have all signed on. My lord people..Tools, options, preferences and uncheck alerts! That crap wouldn't fly on my network, and neither would this google talk..but my windows network administration days are in the past (hopefully to return someday) ....now its time for Unix/AIX administration.
I agree it needs some work, but I really think simplicity is what Google was going for.
One advantage I have seen with Google's voice chat is that (as they claim) they are able to get around firewalls. I'm not quite sure how, but they must use a common port that admins need to leave open.
I was able to voice chat with a person when I was behind a firewall with Google Talk, then we launched MSN talk and it wouldn't work.
Not that a net admin couldn't figure it out and shut it down, I just think they made it simple by having it work around firewalls.
As mentioned in my follow up post, I got around the notification problems, so I'm back to really digging it!
Like MSN 7.0, it picks up your conversation where you left it last, even if it's days later. That's kind of cool. And of course Google Desktop searches your previous chats as well.
It's growing on me, but I think Google will start releasing upgrades soon. They're biggest push is to be compatible with many clients, so that will be an interesting piece to watch...
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