As you've undoubtedly seen, Google have jumped on the IM bandwagon with Google Talk, which includes both a Jabber-based IM service and a Windows only messaging client. When I first saw the announcements, I thought to myself, "oh no, not another Windows only Google application". Thankfully, choosing Jabber was a smart move and Google Talk works flawlessly with iChat on Mac OS X.

So why another messaging system? I don't know. I don't entirely understand why Google would want to do something like this. There aren't even any ads. For me, the biggest benefit is that I know a whole bunch of people that have Gmail accounts, so now it's really easy to get in touch. So that's good. Perhaps it just a branding exercise and an additional channel for hooking people into Gmail. Apparently inviting people to download the Google client also sends them a Gmail invite if they don't have an account. Of course, off the back of Gmail are ads, just waiting to be clicked.

I'm sure more will emerge over the coming weeks, but it'll be interesting to watch what happens. Will everybody start migrating over to Google Talk? Who knows. Will Google solve the cross-platform audio and video conferencing problems? I certainly hope so, because Yahoo! haven't. In the meantime, feel free to get in touch - my Gmail ID is simongbrown.

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Posted by Simon Brown on 24 August 2005 21:35:14 BST #