Easy enough to add to trillian, and therefore done...
Yay!
Is this that " I cant tell *what* " you have been working on at Google? 
Yup -- I'm going to change that soon
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.
Excellent work, Joe.
Your ability--along with other Googlers--to make the complex simple and beautiful never fails to impress me.
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
Very nice. Maybe I can actually keep in touch with you this way.
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?
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
"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."
Good to see you are not being ambitious or anything.
Still, the fact that you support Trillian out of the box made me happy (since there was pretty much zero chance I was going to switch clients at this point).
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
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
My summary on Google Talk:
http://divedi.blogspot.com/2005/...oogle-
talk.html
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,
I would say voice is not that important at when it concerns PDA usage. What is important is a stripped down IM client that can run safely on the limited processing power of a PDA, which I think Google Talk is the beginning of. Thanks for the quick response!
Seth
Until Google Talk is able to link to the existing public Jabber/XMPP network it's nothing but a dead zone to me.
I applaud Google for embracing XMPP but I really hope there's sufficient understanding inside Google that until Google Talk opens the gates to the rest of the world it is *harming*, not helping the progress of interoperable instant messaging.
After spending the past few years encouraging my friends and colleagues to embrace the open Jabber standards it's difficult to articulate how frustrating and demoralizing it is to watch them all finally get Jabber/XMPP accounts this morning in the initial excitement of Google Talk and yet be totally incapable of sending any of them a congratulatory message.
Totally awesome! I'll duplicate the comments above, in that you guys sure know how to make something Simple and Beautiful from something complex.
Your comments explained a lot, too. I'll also echo Seth's sentiments that text IM is more important on a PDA.
I'm up and running on Google Talk, but will primarily connect through GAIM (which gets me access to ALL my existing business and personal contacts on FOUR networks!!) I will dream of Google's federated client and server vision..... :D
works just AWESOME.
I'll vote for voice support on PocketPCs as being pretty important. It is a feature that Skype does already, and pretty well I might add. I think it is handy to be able to make voice calls from my PDA while sitting at a public Wifi hot spot.
Joe: thank you for the answer. I really hope Google talk can interoperate with a lot of servers soon.
PDA users: just pick up a client (without voice) here to connect to Google Talk:
http://www.jabber.org/software/c...e/
clients.shtml
There are a clients for most platforms, at least 4 for PocketPC.
Joe, I've been reading your blog for a couple months now, and I thought to myself last night as I tried out GTalk, I hope this is Joe's secret project.
I love the simpleness of it, at the same time I can't fully adopt it till it gets some SMS support and file transfer (preferably one that works, not like MSNs). Are these features in the pipeline? I see the google blog this morning makes mention of new SMS features coming to gmail...
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, totally understand and think it's because of this simplicty that GTalk will beat out a lot of the other IMs. If I ever see a 'wink' or a 'nudge' in GTalk I'll die
So I'll just sit back play with what you guys have done so far and hope you steal something along the lines of MSNs SMS support and ICQs file transfer
I just hope your team can ignore 'the kids' clamouring for animated smiley faces and pretty backgrounds.
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
I find it amusing how many people didn't even *notice* the cleanliness and simpleness of the release. People must love to underestimate you guys...
It is the mark of a brilliant user interface, though, that the better the design, the less people notice how well it was designed. I for one am very pleased with GTalk. I'm adjusting to the integration with the Sidebar, which I think is pretty cool.
I'll probably mostly still use GAIM for now, though, b/c I need my contact lists from my other 27 million (ok, just 4) IM accounts / clients. I'm solidly in your corner for federation, and will lean on friends and family to ditch the IM companies that won't play along (such as AOL).
There was the suggestion on ArsTechnica that chat logs would be stored within the user's Gmail space.
I think that is an excellent idea if it can be implemented. From the point of view of making it "permanent" not based on a particular OS installation instance or user profile, and from making the logs accessible from any machine.
I'd love to be able to search back to conversations from months/years ago from other machines. I use Windows desktop PC at home atn at work, and a Powerbook, at the moment MSNs logs are fairly useless as the conversation I want to find is never on the same machine as I am searching from.
An opt-in option of course!
I'm curious about one thing: where does Hello fit into this? I know it's a pretty specialized client, really for sharing pictures, but do you get to access and use some of their software?
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,
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
Joe, thanks anyway for the answer - I'll just have to wait and see.
Danny, I love your suggestions, especially 8, also 3-7.
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
Huh - didn't even think of writing my own bot. I'll have to kick that around a little. I've never done something like that before, so it'd probably be a lot of fun! Maybe I'll start by trying to do some simple Google searches via bot.
Well done. Very slick interface.
I am wondering how do you get around the HTTP restrictions in terms of signaling incoming calls for example. Have you got an HTTP request always waiting on the server?
Any plans on skype-like conference calls?
Will there be chat rooms?
One last thing. What does it mean "personal use"? Can I use it at work to collaborate with my co workers in a commercial environment. Obviously not selling the service per se, but the results of the conversations?!
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.
Hi joe, I am the product manager at mvox and we have a USB speakerphone that you can use with Google talk. I would like to send you a few units of our product so you guys at Google can use it to talk to each other. with our product, you guys can do conference call through google talk instead of just a single person using a headset. also the speakerphone has echo cancellation, noise suppresion and smart microphone that has automatic gain control to allow you to speak from a few meters away. email me back if you are interested in our product. or you can catch me on googl talk. my screen name is tchen1212.
thanks
I agree with others here, that server-to-server (s2s)interoperability with the existing Jabber network is very important. Imagine if gtalk users could chat with the 10 million people who already use Jabber, this could possibly push Jabber/XMPP past the critical mass point that is needed. After this point, people would find that they need to use Jabber if they want to partake in instant messaging.
I understand that it's not as easy to write the s2s code as many people would think. Though I also hope that when you do this, that you do it right. It's obviously not a bad thing that potential spam is being considered, however, I am not so keen on the idea of white-listing if it means you have to apply to Google before your server can connect.
At Jabber.org.au we sent out this press release to the local Aussie media, praising for adopting open standards but also pointing out our concerns. Please take it as constructive feedback rather than criticism. I think more light has been revealed since we wrote the release but our concerns about whitelisting still remain.
On the other hand, a form of automatic whitelisting where say you do a test to ensure that the server has inline registration turned off, would be more acceptable. You could simply invoke the test when another server attempts to connect or when a gtalk user attempts to communicate with someone no another server for the first time. That would cut down a bit on the potential of spam since Jabber accounts couldn't be created with automated bots.
Other than that though, server whitelists probably aren't all that necessary overall, since your IM roster can effectively be used as a whitelist. Perhaps people would attempt authorisation spam but I don't see that as being an effective spamming message (if the auth request can't display their message and people reject their request). Bearing in mind that people need to be able to identify when it's a friend that seeks authorisation.
Just to throw some late requests in here, especially since you're sitting in their office:
- Ability to use the Google client to connect via non-Google Jabber servers. Because of the voice functionality.
- Ability to add external Jabber users to the contact list.
- Add the SRV records to the DNS, so S2S works and that users of third-party clients don't need to manually specify a server.
That's about it. Thanks
Tonight I tried Google Talk with two blind friends. It is not accessible for screenreader users - unlike Skype. First barrier is the captcha. If you manage this barrier, screenreaders like JAWS don't get any useful information from Google Talk. Please let Google Talk talk to everyone.
Do you have plans of putting up a crossdomain.xml file at talk.google.com so we can connect from within the Flash client?
See Yahoo's example:
http://api.search.yahoo.com/
cros...crossdomain.xml
Hi all.
I wrote on my blog just few notes about how the voip stack works in Google Talk.
I can only make my best compliments to google staff since they relized a solution using existing standard open protocols:
- xmpp (in primis)
- a generic session estabilishing extension to xmpp (conform to xmpp standard)
- rtp as media transport
- stun for public ip discovery.
Regards,
Francesco
Yet another closed IM is just useless for me and most people I know.
Only s2s could add the needed value, nothing else.
Without s2s, I and most people will stick to MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ or real XMPP/Jabber.
Spam doesn
’t count as argument, because Spam is not an issue on IM (people have to authorize each other before they can talk to each other, which you wouldn’t do with a spammer, so spam is really no issue), so I don’t get why Google is so stupid and stopping halfway.
Well, let
’s see what happens, if Google makes this THE Instant Messenger of the future, by making it real open, as IM like email is already or whether it’ll be just another AIM or MSN which we don’t need because we have those already.
I'd like to congratulate you on a great start to what i believe will be an IM service without peer. It's wonderful to see a company embracing open standards in their products and services.
I've a few suggestions for improvements to your Google Talk service. Most, if not all, will probably be things you've already thought of or are planning to include in the future:
Offline messaging. This is really a must in a good IM service, yet surprisingly many of your contemporaries also don't include it. Hopefully it'll make it into a future release. There exists a good JEP (Jabber Extension Proposal) for Flexable Offline Messaging already, which allows for things such as header-only downloading, and the ability to delete messages from the server without downloading them (handy for when you've been away and return to 12,000 IMs awaiting you ^_^).
Filetransfer. Another essential, and there seem to be a myriad number of ways to do this in the Jabber specs. I hope you contribute to the discussions with the Jabber devs and can settle on one standard way of doing things.
S2S. This is a major one, and i hope that it gets enabled soon. There is already a large network of Jabber servers and users out there, including in many large financial institutions. It would be good if Google would throw open the doors and allow open server to server connections without each server having to "federate" with Google. I understand SPAM/SPIM is a consideration but the Jabber spec guys are working on it as i type. I'm sure Google's input would be appreciated.
Transports/Gateways. Although i'm sure many would be interested in transports onto other IM provider's networks i'm not really bothered about this. The kind of transports i'd be interested in seeing are one's that integrate other Google services: The ability to read and send Gmail inside Gtalk, a Gtalk contact that *is* your Blogger.com blog and when you send it an IM it appears as a new Blog entry, that sort of thing.
And finally i'd like to see a transport/gateway onto the PSTN allowing users to dial phone numbers (for a fee) and not just voice chat with other computer users (i'd drop my current VoIP->PSTN provider in favour of such a service if i could also purchase a number that normal phone users could dial to contact my computer).
Implementing these things as transports rather than adding them to the client itself would allow users of other Jabber servers to use them once you open up S2S connections and allow Google a much larger potential userbase for these services.
I hope there's a few ideas in there that you can use to make Google Talk a better service, and i hope to see them in the future. Thanks again for your support of open standards.
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
Great Job! Google Talk is the best!
Hi, i want to now if google talk is open source like the other jabber clients.
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
will it be ever possible to conect google talk with the MSN network if microsoft doesn't want it?
beside that google talk is great and i love google spirit
Hi Joe, (just a small comment)
Keep up the good work
I love the Google Talk client and everything about it. The only concern I could have would be the lack of people using it. I find AIM to be so deeply embeded that no one wants to use GT. Maybe popularize it someway. Advertise? Bundle with some other handy application? Work with Microsoft to get it into Vista?
GTalk is an awesome client, i have gotten alot of my friends and family to use this. One of my obsticles is definately being able to use it on the road, i am normally out and always with my iBook. The main reason i use GTalk is for audio conversations, having a client for MAC OS X would just make this that much better. Im not sure how long it would take to make a MAC client, but he is wishing that we get one soon
I tip my hat in your direction, keep up the good work.
Hey Joe, love GTalk. When might there be a Mac version? Been using it with Virtual PC 7 running Windows XP Pro. I created a Mac OS X Skin for version 1.0.0.70 http://www.bigblueball.com/forum...working-
on.html
Hi Alex,
Our FAQ says: "The downloadable Google Talk client is not compatible with Macintosh or Linux systems at this time. We look forward to offering support for more operating systems in the future."
Unfortunately I can't comment more than that right now.
Love the skin!
Thanks for the comment on the skin
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I'm wondering what language you used to implement the gtalk client? It seems to be DHTML inside, but the executable itself, window mgt, etc...? C? Java?
Thanks!
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