caseyphillips.net

Well, last night I had my first chance to try out Google Talk. Dubz and I had a conversation over the new IM client last night, and I was pretty impressed. I was impressed more by what it didn't have than with what it did have, although that was impressive too. The interface was extremely clean and very easy to understand. Not a whole mess of options that the average user will never, ever use. It was just simple, and functional. There were a few small things that I particularly liked, such as the alert sound only occurring with window minimized or closed, starting conversations from where they were left off if one participant closed the chat window, and (this one for some reason I really liked) it didn't display the persons name next to every line they messsaged in the chat window, only when speakers changed, which made reading the chat text much easier.

My being microphone-less stopped me from being able to try the VOIP features, but I'm sure they're great as well. I'm also certain there are other features that I'm not aware of yet, as I only played around with it for an hour or so.

One oddity I noticed was that Dubz was the only person in my Gmail contact list added to the Talk's contact list, although others in my Gmail contacs (Benny and Tim I know had for sure, probably others) already had Talk up and running. My theory is they weren't online at the time, so weren't imported, but I'm not certain.

It's going to be interesting to see what additional bells and whistles is added in the coming months. Who knows, maybe I'll become an avid IMer (is that a word?) once again. Probably not, but who knows.