Google Talk and Skype Sitting in a Tree…
Poking through my feeds this late night I saw that Ron wrote up a little piece about the future of Google Talk. It turns out that Google has made an agreement with Skype, allowing the services to work together (soon).
This also has a very important side effect. In essence, Google will now have a Talk client for both Mac and Linux. Previously, Mac and Linux users could use GTalk through Jabber, however there was no way to voice chat.
Well, according to the press release, the work on interoperatibilty are only aimed at text chat and online presence and doesn’t mention voice chat at all.
Don’t take me wrong here, all kinds of interoperatibilty between major players are good!
Hmm, that’s interesting.
So if Skype users can call GTalk users, and GTalk users can call Gizmo users — does that mean that it’s only a matter of time before Skype users can call Gizmo users direct too?
GTalk never got the backing a messenger needs and this agreement is good for it. However I am not sure if Google can offer us something new.
P.S: My first “wisdom sharing” on this blog. Grats for it Paul, simple and comprehensive!
> not sure if Google can offer us something new
not sure who “us” is but Google’s ability to integrate IMs into email has been great! By this I am specifically referring to these 2 features:
* “reply by chat” (with IM discussion appended to email thread)
* automated archiving of IMs (single web-resident search over IM and email)
I might be missing some other advantages - these come to mind immediately.