Cool Marketing Thoughts

Today, when I was at work, I downloaded and installed GTalk on my laptop. First thing I noticed was the message of the GTalk History 2 GMail, which I blogged earlier. Next thing I noticed was that gtalk.com actually is registered by Hasbro, the games & toys & youth electronics entertainment company. How weird. I thought Google was the owner of the dotcoms of all their products. Seems they aren’t.

Last remark I have to add is this: while I was at work, I logged in with my usual account and chatted throughout the afternoon while I was doing some research for a few projects at work. When I came back home just now, I noticed all the chat windows of the people I talked with were open, and I actually never signed out here, at home. I could see the entire conversation I had with each my chat buddies. Perhaps it is because the chat windows were still open, because one person I talked to wasn’t displayed here, only Nathan and Jason, and both windows of our previous conversation hadn’t been closed because we talked through the night and until I left for work.

Now this raises a few issues. Not only is my chat history being stored on two computers, my account allows double usage, or maybe even more. Compared to MSN or other chat clients, where you’re logged out when logging in on another device, this leaves the door open to some privacy issues I think. Agreed, I have to make sure I log out, but suppose the ‘remember me feature’ was clicked accidentally while logging in, that means someone else could remotely tune in and keep track of all my conversations, not by going through the chatlogs, but actually ‘live’ as they are happening.

I don’t know if it’s such a big deal. I just thought it was really weird to come home and see all the open IM windows with conversations I had with people while I was physically approximately 25km (15.5 miles) away, logged in on another PC and on another network. That kind of freaked me out a bit.

Here’s what you can do to simulate this: at home, open a few chat windows to buddies. Leave home, go elsewhere and log in again. Talk to the same people of whom you’ve left the chat windows open. You’ll see the result when you come back home, even if you’ve logged out on the second (remote) computer.