Yesterday, like the rest of the Known Universe, I installed Google Talk. I already have a Google Mail account, and, being a fan of Jabber, wanted to see how well they’ve done with the implementation.
If you can connect — and some people have had issues from their non-Google Jabber clients — the connection is swift. I don’t expect many scaling issues on the server side, but you never know. The Google Talk client initially tries to connect on the standard Jabber port, tcp/5222, but if that fails will connect over HTTP. Once it is connected, the response is snappy: it’s not burdened by the features and advertisements that clutter AIM, Y!M and MSN Messenger.
Everybody in my Google Mail address book can be invited to use Google Talk. If they accept my invitation, they’ll be added to my friends list. This process is simple, but because the user interface is sparse, it took some time to see how to do this — about two or three minutes.
After inviting a couple of my friends, and finding gmail addresses that I didn’t yet know, we exchanged a few text messages. Nothing out of the ordinary there. And then I talked with Jeff Beckham.
Now that was different.
After two or so text messages, I clicked the “talk” button to invite him to talk. He answered, and now I know what his voice sounds like! We spoke for a few minutes, then shifted back to text.
What was strange was the modal shift between the asynchronous text messaging and the synchronous talking. It was a little disturbing. Do you say hello? You were already talking, albeit by teletype. How do you end the call? But I can see the attraction of this for many people — they simply find it easier to talk than to write — and this integrates the best of both worlds.
Did I mention it’s free?