August 25, 2005

Google Talk(s), But What Does it Say?

Late Tuesday night, Google introduced a new application called Google Talk. It is a small client that uses a person’s Gmail id for authentication and allows email, IM or voice communication with other “buddies”. Granted that this is a Beta version; but it is far from a full featured product. Indeed, it looks like it has been rushed out for other corporate reasons. This is the focus of this note.

Since other bloggers have sufficiently described this application, a quick summary will suffice. A new user can quickly import the contact list from the Gmail account. It is a simple process to invite a contact to join the buddy list. Till that person accepts the invitation, only email contact is allowed. If a buddy is available then one can either talk to or IM that person, by clicking on that person’s name. Here GT is different from other IM systems that it has been compared to. In other IM systems, you will be presented with a text chat window. (If you want to talk, then you click the “Call” button.) But in GT, you are presented with a text chat window, but the buddy is audibly alerted. In my opinion this is a fundamental difference – in GT the primary means of communication is voice chat.

He text chat feature lacks many of the standard features. Yes you can archive a text chat session. But it is not clear how to retrieve the archive. If I am doing it correctly, then the archive does not maintain the timestamp. This is obviously an oversight on the part of company whose objective is to organize information. I don’t think there is a way to search the archive either. Given that GT anticipates that talking will be the primary mode of communication, there is no way to archive a talk session.

The current version is strictly for two person communication – no multi-party text or talk sessions.

Given the tight integration with Gmail, it is surprising that they didn’t include voice mail capability. I was specifically looking for a way to record a voice snippet using GT and send it as an email attachment to the recipient.

If I use it a bit more, I am sure I will be able to add more. All these points can be easily rectified and I am sure Google will do just that. But the question is why Google released such an early stage product. I am not suggesting that it should have been full featured. I am saying that the features that they decided to include are not fully developed and are not comparable to the ones already available.

My theory is that Google wanted to squash the “Skype rumor”, lest it adversely affect their upcoming supplementary stock offering.

Let me also speculate the real business plan behind GT. Once users become comfortable wearing a headset and talking over them, the ads can not only be linked to web pages but also to GT, thereby more effectively realize the objectives of thinkingVoice.

TCast

Posted by aswath at August 25, 2005 02:57 AM
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