Yey. It’s online ! Google’s instant messenger is airborne. This morning when I woke up, I found Randy’s invitation blinking in my inbox and I immediately joined this fresh service.
Then I got hooked up with a new GMail account because I accidentally clicked the first link in the invitation, instead of the second one right below.
(I was way too enthousiastic and was thinking ‘join-join-join-yes-yes-yes’, which kind of resulted in clicking the first link I saw without even reading the mail)
Then I wanted to delete the new GMail account (who needs two or more anyways) but that seemed impossible because it didn’t recognize the password I had just entered minutes before. So, Google if you read this : you can delete mielvan@gmail.com and I think maybe it could be I won’t be the only one with this problem.
Shortly after Randy, Nathan invited me too. Ow joy :) I never talked to Nathan in person.
Other remarks about the beta : okay, since it’s Google’s IM client, logical thinking implicates you need an @gmail.com address. If you haven’t got one yet you can contact me – I’ve got 50 invites left -, and Google just launched a service (overseas in the US and maybe Canada) that allows you to apply for an invite per text message.
But I think it’ll be sweet if other addresses could be used to join GoogleTalk. I know hotmail allows it, but it’s not a must.
The log-my-conversations can be opted-out on. I like that a lot.
Problem I’ve just encountered: current apps running allowing ‘Talk’ in general :
* Trillian (MSN, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ,IRC) , Skype and now GoogleTalk.
There should be a system of recognition between these apps so that my status on Skype
changes to ‘busy talking’ (when I’m talking on Google) and vice versa. If it wasn’t for Trillian, I’d be running another 4 or 5 apps extra to be able to talk to some friends on the different clients.
Situation now : I can talk to multiple people at once, on multiple applications. Google needs to mute or send a ‘busy’ signal to Skype when I’m talking, so that the calls can be diverted to the Skype voicemail. (Or so that the caller from Skype is informed I’m busy calling on another application) And also vice versa.
The quality of the signal is just great. I’ve been calling three times to test it. From Belgium to Ivan in New Zealand goes just great, no interruptions whatsoever, great quality of the sound. Same goes for the call to Nathan in NY. I don’t know if Nathan’s on a W-LAN, but I know Ivan is. I’m on cable. The connection went really well, so we tested that. The other problem there was, was with the call to Hans from the Netherlands. Geographically, it’s very close, but the connection really stuttered a lot. Perhaps it was because Hans is on W-LAN too, and his daughter was ‘upstairs’ downloading stuff and chatting . Otherwise, no complaints about the quality of the service.
Very good feature is the ’select from my contacts’ option when you click the ‘add friends’ link in the bottom right corner of the main interface.
I still need to find out how to change my nickname, I doesn’t seem very obvious to me… I can’t locate it. Perhaps it’s based on the GMail settings, but I don’t want the appearance of my e-mails to change, so I think there must be a way to fix it, without messing up the GMail settings.
GoogleTalk for Mac ? No sign yet. :(
Read [All About GoogleTalk] and [download] it
So now I’m going to have to base my friendship on the apps my friends-to-be are running. I can’t connect to all of them at once. I want just one program that covers it all. One great tool that allows me to talk to anyone, no matter what service they are on. If they use AIM and I’m on GoogleTalk, I think we should be able to talk. How come everybody has to open up an account somewhere at the service to be able to talk the users of that service?
I mean if I’m on a cell phone network called ‘one’ I can still call to a friend who’s using network ‘two’ for his mobile. I mean, suppose cingular would say it no longer will connect you to numbers that are not on their network – it would be a scandal. Yet still, with all these chat clients around, this is the active policy today.
Something else I’m missing, and of which I think Google has the capacity to do it, is to be able to send a message to someone who’s not online at that time. ICQ has this great feature that when I send a message to an offline user, the message gets delivered as soon as that user connects again. That’s a really good thing I’d like to have on GoogleTalk.