How could you get answers from Google faster than searching? Add Google’s new Talk Guru to your Google Talk contacts, then ping him/her/it with your questions about the weather in Dallas, what $5 in Romanian leu equals in Australian dollars, and translating words between many languages. More »
The Gmail team admits in a blog post that options for video, voice and group chat were “curiously tucked away” in the lower-left corner, so they’ve taken steps to fix it. More »
Do you get inopportune IM chats on your Android phone, even if you haven’t activated the Google Talk application? There’s a setting in the app that always makes you available. Here’s how to turn it off. More »
Google today will finally remove the long-standing beta tag from some of its most popular web applications, most notably its wildly popular email application, Gmail. More »
Linux only: It will only ever truly support Jabber/XMPP/Google Talk, but Synapse, a new alpha-level IM app, is a pretty—and pretty efficient—way to chat if you’re all about open-source communication.
The developer of Synapse has a goal of spreading the love for XMPP, which is an open, extensible chat standard. That’s great for the open-minded set, and users of Google Talk, which conforms to the standard, but is obviously a bit restricting, given the number of contacts one might have on “legacy” systems like AIM or MSN. There might be room in the future for server-side conversion of other protocols to XMPP, but for the time being, it’s open-source or the road.
That said, even in a theoretically buggy alpha, Synapse looks great.
Today Google starts rolling out voice and video chat inside Gmail—which requires a free browser plug-in download, and, obviously, a webcam. Googler Justin Uberti explains:
Google just launched an iPhone-friendly interface for its web-based Google Talk client—point your mobile Safari to google.com/talk to see it in action. Firefox users, this also means, as the Digital Inspiration blog points out, you’ve got a friendly little GChat client you can keep loaded in your sidebar (create a bookmark, check “Load in sidebar”), but any browser can access the interface through talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/m.
If you rock Google Talk in your Firefox sidebar, you’ll be happy to know that it’s finally integrated the Invisible status a good three months after Gmail’s chat. Still no update on the desktop client, though there are still ways to manipulate your idle status.
If you use Twitter in Australia, you know that you need to SMS a UK-based number to update (or tweet). That could work out to be expensive! I’m going to go through a few options which might work out cheaper for you. Today let’s look at using Google Talk.To update Twitter via IM from your Gtalk account, you’ll need to add Twitter as a contact.
Here’s how – just add twitter@twitter.com as your contact in GTalk and then go to the Twitter home page to add IM as a method of updating. On the left hand side of the page you’ll see a link to “add device” – hit that, then put in your IM account details. It will give you a password to send to twitter via IM to confirm. You can also send an IM saying “Help” if you want further information.
Now whenever you IM this new friend called Twitter, the message will automatically publish on your Twitter account. It seems to appear pretty quickly too. More »
Windows only: For some time now, Google Talk has been more appealing as a web app than in its rarely updated desktop version. That changes, somewhat, with the release of Google Talk Labs Edition for Windows. The desktop client, which looks a lot like its web counterpart, includes the same group chat, emoticons and tabbed talking as the web, and puts pop-up notifications for Google Calendar, Gmail and Orkut events in the corner of your screen—which is a nice, consolidated way of getting that Outlook-like functionality. The big trade-off, however, is the lack of voice calling or file transfer through the Labs Edition, so if those are regular features, you’ll likely want to stick with whatever version you’re using now. Google Talk Labs Edition is a free download for Windows systems only.
