All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

His article completely ignores the whole point of Google Talk… Google actually has the clout to pull everyone together. It’s a huge name and is a rising star, not a fading one like AOL/Yahoo. Plus, the same argument could have been made against gmail. “I already have hotmail and yahoo accounts, like I really need another free webmail account.” Yet it seems that everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon to get their gmail accounts as fast as possible. Why? Because Google offered some innovations and features that the others didn’t. Doesn’t it really come down to who offers the best product? (Notice Google Talk is ad-free…can’t say the same for AIM, which is the only other IM client I currently use.)

Posted by Cards on 24 August 2005 @ 4pm

I’m going to have to agree with Cards, here. The article missed the whole point. It’s not about running dozens of messengers. It’s about a company producing a messenger that’s good enough to make lots of people switch over to it, thus making it to where you only have to run ONE IM application.

Google Talk cuts right down to the very basics of what an IM application should be. There aren’t any “xtraz” like on ICQ, there aren’t any ads, you can’t play games on it, etc. etc. It’s a very sleek, very fast, very lightweight IM application. An OLD version of ICQ that I use (2003a, one of the versions that isn’t totally bogged down with extra crap) eats up 9megs of memory.

Google Talk looks better, works better, and works faster, and it takes up 5megs of memory.

As a sidenote about the article, the guy is complaining about having to run all these different messenger apps to keep track of his friends. Is he too stupid to fire up GAIM?

Posted by Josh on 25 August 2005 @ 6am

I think part of the problem though is there are many people out there that stick with what they have because of all the features you get. I have friends who swear by ICQ, MSN, Y!, and AIM leaving me off the boat in keeping in touch virtually if I don’t have ‘em all. Sure this has the ability to convert those who want an easy-to-use, sleek, and efficient IM app… but does it have the pull to get people off the various bandwagon’s they are already riding? I’ve spread the word to my friends and only one has said it was worthwhile..

Posted by Chris on 25 August 2005 @ 9am

Google wants to bring everything together. If they have their way AIM, MSN Messneger, and Yahoo Messenger, along with no names, and all jabber servers will eventually work with them.

Google’s plan is to pull everyone together - Instead of pulling them simply to their own client. As far as I can tell Google would allow people to chat on AIM to Google Talk users (so long as it works the other way too).

Plus the guy says AIM is the most ugly - Come on.. It’s the LEAST ugly!

Posted by Anthony on 25 August 2005 @ 9pm