Google Talk

When I announced the launch of Google Talk at our office Intranet, nobody seemed to comment on it and I was less surprised with the lack of attention. Perhaps people in the office are aware that the latest messenger service to be offered in the market pales in comparison with the rest of the leading pack such as AOL Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and ICQ.

I learned that this product does not provide the usual bells and whistles of an instant messenger tool: SMS capability, teleconference chats, search boxes and file sharing. After all, who could expect a little program less than 1 megabyte in size to cover such features?

Not everyone can use this as well. Someone must have Google Mail account to activate this service. Justifiably this is intended to curb the abuse of unscrupulous individuals who could manipulate Google Talk into a spam machine.

It is unusually under-hyped compared to other Google product offers launched in the past (think of Google Desktop Search, Sitemaps and Google Earth). Was this intentionally planned? I bet it is.

With Google’s capability to innovate things it’s not difficult for it to provide features that are deemed out of this world at this time. (By the way look at this). Therefore it will not surprising to see later versions of Google Talk overwhelm the competition with unique features. Remember, this release is its first.