Interesting Point: It supports the Jabber, for as long as you login with a valid gmail account. Man, these guys are slowly taking over EVERYTHING.
>>31
Useful stuff here:
http://www.customizetalk.com/pages/index.php?page=downloads
I just discovered the blogs of several Google Talk developers. These developers have been happy to talk about their project and plans. For some reason, they have been mainly ignored and people have been in confusion about S2S and so forth on Slashdot.
http://www.eightypercent.net/ <-- most interesting
http://www.glaak.com/
http://www.brightlycoloredfood.com/
http://www.rezab.com/
kopipe:
Without avatar/picture, emoticons... and Google Talk itself can't be used as a generic Jabber client... sigh still quite lame, only a hardcore fan like me can get excited.
choonkeat | Email | Homepage | 08.23.05 - 10:46 pm | #
Choonkeat -- totally understand your concerns. We are starting simple and building up. We wanted to build a usable service with the most important features and get that out there first.
As for emoticons -- sure we support them. Just type :) in a window and see that it is bolded. We know about emoticons ;)
Joe
Joe Beda | Email | Homepage | 08.23.05 - 11:13 pm | #
I am happy to see Google Talk around there.
But really, I don't understand why Google Talk does not communicate with other servers. This is a basic functionality, so it feels like Google blocked it deliberately.
If a user @gmail.com can not communicate with a user @jabber.org (at least sending IM), how can you make IM as open as email?
b-dash | Email | Homepage | 08.24.05 - 1:39 am | #
Hi b-dash,
You bring up a very good point. Personally, I wish that we could do open federation right away.
Here are some reasons off of the top of my head why we might be moving slow here (There may be more reasons and some of these may not resonate with some of my fellow team members):
1) We haven't written the code on our server to do so yet. We've been spending our time getting ready to handle lots and lots of users.
2) We need to continue to develop comprehensive abuse/spam countermeasures. We want to make sure we have a handle on this on our own network before we introduce more variables.
3) We want to find a way to ensure a fully connected network. If we federate with both A and B, we also want A and B to federate with each other. We need to work to make this happen.
Personally I think that the ultimate destination is to come up with a system that is as distributed and decentralized as SMTP/email while not falling prey to the spam problems that SMTP has. We are going to test those waters first off by starting federation with a few partners and then moving on from there.
I hope this answers some of your questions.
Joe
Joe Beda | Email | Homepage | 08.24.05 - 1:59 am | #
Heh -- this isn't an ambition for Google Talk, but rather an ambition for all users to be able to talk outside of the walled gardens they are in now. The idea isn't anything super new either. The Jabber/XMPP guys have been working toward this goal for a long time now.
I would fully expect in this mythical super distributed world that Googles IM service would be a fraction of the total pie. But the pie itself will be so much more interesting and valuable to everyone.
Joe
Joe Beda | Email | Homepage | 08.24.05 - 7:39 am | #
CONTINUED
As I downloaded and installed Google Talk mere seconds after its release last night, I thought maybe, just maybe, since it was such a small file, that it would run on my HP Pocket PC. But, to no avail. Is there any chance that you guys could release a Windows CE/Windows Pocket 2003 version of Google Talk? There are few options when it comes to IM-ing on the Pocket PC, and this would be a great one.
Seth
Seth | Email | Homepage | 08.24.05 - 7:57 am | #
Hey Seth,
Good idea! We'd love to run on any platform out there. If you don't want to wait for us to do something like that feel free to get started by write your own client ;)
How important is voice in that application do you think? Or do you just want text chat?
Joe
Joe Beda | Email | Homepage | 08.24.05 - 8:23 am | #
Hi Dan,
We have lots of ideas for future features. We are going through the process of prioritizing them now and figuring out what we are going to do next.
We have a pretty small team and the goal to keep the client as simple to use as possible. That means that the bar for new features is pretty high. Because of this I'm hesistant to promise anything. I'm sure you understand.
I can tell you that I'm a huge fan of doing SMS interop and file transfer. For file transfer in particular, I think that there is real room to innovate above and beyond the "here is a file" model that a lot of the current IM clients have.
Thanks for the encouraging words!
Joe
Joe Beda | Email | Homepage | 08.25.05 - 8:26 am | #
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your enthusiasm. I'm glad that our effort at simplicity is being appreciated. While I can't promise that we'll never have graphical or animated smileys (there are a lot of people on either side of that issue) I can promise you that we'll try hard not to loose the clean and simple look (and interaction) that we worked hard on for this first release.
Joe
Joe Beda | Email | Homepage | 08.25.05 - 1:24 pm | #
Hey Step,
I really don't have anything concrete to tell you wrt Hello. Sorry, but there just isn't anything to say yet.
Joe
Joe Beda | Email | Homepage | 08.25.05 - 9:12 pm | #
Joe,
Gtalk is brilliantly simple. You guys really made the ultra simple chat client.
Here are my suggestions right now:
1) Notifications of a message popup on a window occurs when the same conversation window is still open.
2) The add a friend button I think is not bold enough.
3) When you add a user, a request comes up on the gmail client. I think you guys should take to the other way, or at least put an option for having a request popup instead of appear on the window. It took me some time to find it after a friend added me.
4) The little balloon icon on the taskbar looks nice; however, I think a nice touch could be (again this is just a suggestion) to have the number of new emails in your gmail inbox show on the balloon.
5) I love how you have no text limit (yet), perhaps though a nice add on could be if a user tries to send a huge message, a request can go to the other user asking if the user would like to receive a large text message.
6) "Check for updates" seems to be not working... I click it and no notification comes up on my screen.
7) You should probably have the ability to delete recent away messages (Perhaps a right click).
A real big suggestion: allow offline messages for people to receive once they log back on. It's a huge feature that will really help gtalk.
9) A suggestion: Create some "bots" for google talk that can give people customer support. Or you can have these bots do functions for users like send emails quickly, check weather, scores, google searches, ect... Sort of like SmarterChild on AIM.
Again these are my bug finds and suggestions, I'm already in love with gtalk.
In 50 years when this program reaches pinnical, I can be like an old grandpa saying, "Back in the day, I remember when google talk just started... I was one of the first to use google talk "
All you guys need now is a google bible.
Excellent work to Joe and his team,
-Danny
Danny Miller | Email | Homepage | 08.26.05 - 4:35 am | #
Danny --
Great suggestions!
Let me go through them one by one.
1) The code currently will pop up the notifications if the chat window doesn't have focus and any part of Google Talk is obscured by another window. The reasoning is that the you may not be able to see the chat window (or perhaps the task bar) and we wanted to draw your attention to the new chat. What do you think?
2) Gotcha -- we didn't want that to take too much space, but you may be right that it needs to be more obvious.
3) Ah -- I see -- you want a notification (we call them toast since they pop up like toast out of a toaster) to show up when you get invited. Good idea.
4) It has been requested to at least show a different icon when you have new mail. The gmail notifier did this and we didn't have time to get everything togther. There is also a bug right now where we don't notice when the you've read mail and take the count down. I want to fix that (requires some server work too) before I start using the unread count for more stuff. BTW, the old gmail notifier used to poll the server while the new notification code in Google Talk waits for the server to tell it when there is new mail. The idea is that it will be more accurate and load the servers less.
5) There is a text limit I think -- it is just really really big Good idea about asking. We're going to have to see how much of a problem something like this is.
6) Check for updates won't say anything if there is no update. Good idea that we should tell you about this! If there were an update available, it would immediately install it for you.
7) yup -- good idea. Better management of that list would be good.
Another good idea. We have lots of ideas here but didn't have time to finish it up for this release. We want to really think through all the scenarios and make it feel seamless.
9) Another good idea! If you are a programmer type, you can play around with writing your own bot. Right now there is a limit to how many people you can have on your roster (~2k, I think) that can limit how useful a bot can be. We have to think about how other people can write bots.
Thanks for all your enthusiasm! While it is clear that we have our work cut out for us, I'm glad you appreciate what we've done so far.
Joe
Joe Beda | Email | Homepage | 08.26.05 - 7:23 am | #
Hi Mariano,
We don't use HTTP for the chat connection. Instead we open up a persistent connection. We try to use the standard Jabber port (5222) first. If that doesn't work we have some other tricks to try and get the connection set up.
As for the conference calls and chat rooms, we want to do a bunch of stuff but we aren't ready to promise anything yet.
As for "personal use" I'm not a lawyer, but I'm assuming it is okay to use it to talk to coworders. I wouldn't sweat that.
Joe Beda | Email | Homepage | 08.26.05 - 11:40 am | #
PickledMonkey,
Thanks for the great suggestions and the enthusiasm. These are all great ideas.
Right now we are sorting through the feature suggestions and prioritizing what makes sense for us to do next. Please be patient with us as we are still in Beta :)
Joe
Joe Beda | Email | Homepage | 08.29.05 - 3:05 pm | #
Hi Javier,
We haven't released the code for our client so we aren't open source in that respect.
However, we do allow others to connect to our service and are working toward open federation of our network.
Joe
Joe Beda | Email | Homepage | 09.05.05 - 3:50 pm | #