Two years ago next month, Google bought five percent of AOL for a billion dollars. Yeah, you might have forgotten that, but it was a really big deal at the time. While Google’s main motivation was to keep being the search technology for fifth-place AOL Search, there was a lot of talk on both sides about the two companies working together. The big get, mentioned right in the press release: Google Talk and AOL Instant Messenger integration.
What the hell happened? It’s been two years, and the two products have made less effort to work together than the U.S. Congress. Granted, development on Google Talk has gone dark, with a second version of the product either not in development or massively delayed, and AOL’s rising star software division suffered massive multiple layoffs that have decimated their ability to ship good products and hold talented engineers, but interaction between the protocols could have been done quickly if someone had made it a priority.
As we do every once in a while, we’re hearing more leaks about supposed GTalk/AIM integration, this time in the form of leaked screenshots of a future Gmail build. If Gmail Chat gets AIM integration, that would be great news, but if it gets it and Google Talk doesn’t, it might be time to declare development of Talk a dead project. All the new Google Talk features seem to be happening in other projects, while the desktop client lies fallow.
I’m sure there are Google Talk users who’d love to be able to sign into multiple Google Accounts at once, manage personal and business contacts seperately. Well, turns out you’ve always been able to, just by applying a command line switch. It’s pretty easy, just:
Create a new shortcut to Google Talk
Right-click and go into its properties
Add “/nomutex” to the end of the Target entry
Now, you can open as many instances of Google Talk as you’d like, logging into different accounts with each one. Look at the screenshots above, you can see me chatting (and arguing) with myself.
Ionut Alex posted about a new feature added to the Google Talk Gadget for iGoogle, which can now handle multi-user chat. The chat client now lets you click a Group Chat button to invite more than just two people into a chat, something you cannot do in the regular PC software, or in the Gmail chat version. In fact, if you invite someone using any Gtalk-compatible client other than the iGoogle Gadget, it won’t work, and they’ll just be sent a link.
For the most part, the new feature doesn’t make sense. The Gadget is a supplement to the real client, so why does it have features the real one doesn’t? Most likely, and this is just speculation, there’s been development of a version 2.0 of Google Talk that will support this feature, but the client has suffered major delays, enough to the point that they just said “Screw it” and released the Gadget version. Don’t be surprised to see that new version of Google Talk sometime this summer.
That, or Google has abandoned the software version of Google Talk, which would be a damn shame, and is unlikely.
Interesting that Google and Yahoo (Google a lot more so) decided to make quasi-political statements about global warming, but I guess Earth Day is political in its own way. Google’s melting glaciers has to be the first time they’ve sent a message like that.
Google has bought the conferencing software developed by Marratech, giving it a powerful desktop-based collaboration tool with video, text, VoIP and whiteboard features. Google’s blog post indicates they will be using the software internally, for employee communications, but it is certainly reasonable that Google may eventually fold it into a more powerful version of Google Talk, or use technology in Gmail or the Google Apps suite.
Wouldn’t it be funny if Google just bought a copy of some software at Staples, and issued a blog post that read like they had bought the company? I mean, the Marratech press release/blog post almost read like they did exactly that. I can picture it now…
Collaborating with Microsoft
Thursday, April 19, 2007 at 8:10:00 PM
Posted by Douglas Merrill, VP Engineering
As a company, we thrive on fun interactions and spontaneous video gaming. So we’re excited about acquiring Microsoft’s video gaming console, the Xbox 360, which will enable from-the-couch gaming for Googlers in videogaming meetings wherever there’s a TV.
We look forward to learning from the extraordinary ingenuity of Microsoft’s engineers as they focus on video gaming research and development in Seattle, where they will continue to be located.
Update: To clarify some confusion, we bought an Xbox at Best Buy, not the company itself.
Blogger has added integration of the AJAX news bar and YouTube/Google Video bar as an easy drag and drop addition to your template. The bars are available for every website, as well as blog and web search bars, but Blogger’s addition makes it easy for less advanced users to configure and just drop in.
Finally, Google released today a version of Google Desktop for the Mac. Desktop, which is already being accused of duplicating Windows Vista features (and thus more useful on XP), also duplicates Mac OS X’s excellent desktop search. Presumably it will eventually also do what it does on Windows, that is duplicate the Mac’s widget feature. Still, Desktop is free and has many features (and is in many ways faster and more efficient) than the Mac’s built-in search, so it will no doubt appeal to many users.
Google has released a Gadget that allows you to run Google Talk on your personalized homepage, letting you run Talk within your browser without running it in Gmail. The Gadget in some ways has better functionality than even the desktop version of Google Talk, because it puts your instant messages in tabs, a useful feature in other IM programs that GTalk has yet to implement. It has other cool features, like showing YouTube and Google Video videos within the conversation window if a video URL is pasted, as well as photo slideshows from Picasa Web Albums.
Gmail’s storage space is now increasing at a faster rate. Previously, your inbox size increased by 0.33 megabytes a day, while now it gets almost 0.4 megabytes higher per day, or 145 megabytes a year. At current rates, Gmail will reach 3.56 gigabytes of space on April 1, 2012.
Viacom, who removed 100,000 videos from YouTube in a copyright purge and then sued Google for a billion dollars, is now being sued by YouTube users who had their legal videos improperly deleted during Viacom’s purge. Since the DMCA punishes those that use it improperly, Viacom could be in big trouble at the hands of the same law it is trying to slap Google with. Wonderful!
Google has released a blog version of its AJAX news ticker, showing blog headlines instead of news headlines. Nifty. (via)
What? I had more than one story about integrations and such, and that was easily the worst title I could think of. Who would have thought there was a way to include “stuff” in a title four times, and have it vaguely make sense?
Google Notebook is now integrating with Google Docs, letting you one-click export your entire notebook. Considering that Google is slowly acknowledging it is releasing too many products, and that Yahoo has received criticism for having multiple products with the same function, I could see Google closing Google Notebook eventually. Wouldn’t Notebook serve more of Google’s purposes as a plugin for Google Docs, then as a seperate product? Probably.
You can now send Twitter updates from Google Talk, by sending messages to twitter@twitter.com. Frankly, it doesn’t work, since it created a new Twitter account for me, instead of letting me post to my regular Twitter account. I’ll stick with posting through the Twitter Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget. Speaking of which, add me as a friend if you are on Twitter.
Valleywag wonders if Dodgeball is now completely over with Twitter gaining steam. Yeah, probably.
Here’s a real shame: Google hasn’t updated Google Trends since November. I liked Google Trends, even if it had many limitations, and I’d hate to see it so neglected. They neglected Google Images for awhile once, and it met with a lot of criticism. I don’t think Google Trends ever had that many loyal users, but it presented a useful peek into the thoughts of the Google-using public.
There are now two editions of Goofle Apps: the free Standard Edition and the paid Premier Edition. Both editions have Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Page Creator, and a customized start page, no limit to the number of accounts, mobile access, and administrator control panel and web-based support.
Premier Edition differs like so: For $50 per user per year, you get a 99.9% uptime guarantee for email, 10 gigabyte inboxes for all email accounts (up from 2 gigs for the free version), the option of removing advertising from Gmail, shared calendars, APIs for integrating existing infrastructure (including single sign-on, user provisioning and management, and support for an email gateway), a limited release of email migration tools, 24/7 phone support, and third party applications and services.
A note: A 99.9% uptime guarantee means your account will be down for no more than 43.829 minutes per month. Google’s getting better, but outages have happened to Gmail, and I’m sure there will be months where Google has to refund a number of customers.
There is a free trial of Google Apps Premier through the end of April. Google Apps is free for schools and other educational institutions, as well as free for families and groups, which is really just another way of saying that those people can only sign up for the free version.
Here’s the control panel:
Interestingly, according to Nielsen/Netratings via Ionut Alex, Google Docs & Spreadsheets has pretty much cornered the entire market for web-based office applications, taking 92% market share. Looks like the market was pretty much just waiting for any big player to step in, and as soon as Google did, that was that.
For a 1,000-person organization, with a good licensing contract, that could come out to $250-$300 a user, or about five times the cost of Google’s solution. If you upgrade every other Microsoft Office release, that means $250 per user per six years, putting the total cost per year at $41-50, as much as nine dollars less than Google. For less money, you get to own your software, not rely on another company’s servers, get PowerPoint, get more powerful versions of every application, get an Exchange Server (which has many powerful advantages), and get Groove, a hugely powerful collaboration system, all of which scales cheaper as your organization gets bigger.
I’m not sure how integrated it is in Yahoo Mail and how it compares to Gmail Chat, but it’s interesting to see this becoming a trend. I wonder if Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail, which is full of advanced functionality and is on a platform known for advanced web interfaces, is planning IM integration, and if they’ve got some cool ideas on how to do it. LiveSide seems to indicate that there will be an upgrade there this summer.
Also, Google has released a cool AJAX news bar that websites can use to display news headlines and excerpts. You pick some keywords and choose a format, either a thin bar with changing headlines or a substantial sidebar chunk that changes tabs of news stories complete with excerpts, and get an easy bar, or you can heavily customize the code to do all sorts of cool things.
Turns out Google Talk hooks into the operating system to give you some command line options, which means you can create desktop shortcut icons that link to specific Google Talk actions. As Ionut Alex reports, using “gtalk:chat?jid=[Gmail-Username]@gmail.com” will launch a Gtalk chat window for the specified contact, while “gtalk:call?jid=[Gmail-Username]@gmail.com” will automatically call that person.
What you can do with this is create a shortcut, on your desktop, that launches exactly the chat or call option you are interested in, and you can even create an icon for it (like a picture of that person’s face). You can also use this in conjunction with Windows Task Scheduler, to make Windows automatically call a specific person at a specific time, which opens up all sorts of possibilities (including practical jokes).
Over a year ago, Google paid a billion dollars for a chunk of AOL, and probably the most exciting part of the deal was the announcement that Google Talk and AOL Instant Messenger would probable eventually connect to each other. Finally, after 13 months of silence, Googler (and former AIM developer) Justin Uberti has sorta maybe confirmed that Google is still working on it, or at least that the official statement (”We are working actively on integrating AIM access in Google Talk.”) still applies.
On the AOL side (connecting AIM to Google Talk), he’s not sure if AOL’s new management will make it enough of a priority, but notes AOL has a project in the works to allow Jabber clients (Google Talk is one) to access the AIM network, logged in under AIM screen names. It appears that AOL users should not wait up for AOL to add Google Talk access, but Google could (and might already be) do some cool stuff.
The best situation: Google Talk connects to the AIM network, letting Google Talk users add AIM users to their buddy list and chat with them. Google Talk also lets you log in simultaneously with your AIM screen name, getting your regular AIM buddy list and screen name. The idea: You log in under both names, at the same time, getting the AIM buddy list and not losing your old screen name, but slowly moving more over to the Google Talk network, since it lets you login both ways.
(via Ionut Alex)
The new Yahoo Messenger for Windows Vista takes advantage of a new technology in Vista called the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which makes it easier for developers to create applications that use rich graphics without some of the massive coding and design work previously involved in such applications, and with better performance by taking advantage of native Windows Vista technologies. The Vista Messenger sets such a great visual standard for rich WPF applications in Vista, that it actually puts to shame a lot of what Microsoft has been developing to show off its new operating system, and that’s a good sign.
While it looks great and has some really cool features (seriously, check out the video) I’m sure it isn’t for everyone, including a lot of people who swear by Google’s designs. Still, I wonder if we’ll ever see from Google products that are visually arresting, and not just because of immense amounts of white space. I wouldn’t mind a Google Talk that had just a little bit of extra design work in it, taking advantage of the power of the computer I paid good money for. Because I really like Google, does that mean I have to give up on rich, beautiful, feature-filled applications, all in the interest of simplicity? How does everyone else feel?
(via Neowin)
Looks like a new version of Google Talk is available, one that adds support for Windows Vista. Of course, if you already have Talk installed (which would require you to have had Talk installed under Windows XP, then upgraded to Vista), Talk can’t upgrade itself, and you’ll have to uninstall it, then reinstall from Google.com/talk. Otherwise, everything seems exactly the same, and it runs perfectly fine.
Google Enterprise VP David Girouard spoke to InternetNews, and he dropped a lot of interesting info. Chief among them: Google Talk “will be beefed up to integrate with traditional phone systems as well as VoIP offerings from other vendors”. That seems to be saying that Talk will be able to make phone calls, but certainly isn’t specific enough to be absolutely sure. The discussion centers around taking Talk from the consumer space into becoming a viable enterprise client, which could refer more to integration as a means of free calling among Talk users as part of integration, but without actually adding VoiP to Google Talk.
Girouard also said that one problem companies have with using Google Docs and Spreadsheets is offline access to their data, an issue Google plans to resolve. Google strategy, according to the VP, is:
Girouard explained that Google plans to access the enterprise market by riding in on the shoulders of people like you and me who already use their applications for fun.
“Our focus is, and really ought to be, with applications that have a place in the consumer world and port them over to the enterprise and take advantage of the big Google that everybody knows,” he told internetnews.com.
Interesting idea. Of course, for it to work, Google needs to get its products to actually be popular in the consumer world, something they haven’t had a terrible amount of luck with so far. For now, a better way to get the foot in the door is probably through Gmail (which is why you see that link bar in the top-left of the Gmail interface).
(via Ionut. Alex > Findory)
Gmail’s got an easter egg of an emoticon, one that is definitely a reference to a great SNL sketch starring Christopher Walkin. Just enter +/’\ into a Gmail chat window and hit enter. Enjoy!
Google added Google Maps to Search History, so you can now track those searches. Maps joins web search, images, news and Froogle in Search History (how about Blog Search?).
Google and Yahoo are asking the Securities and Exchange Commission to review the fees charged for stock quotes and other market data. The NYSE recently raised its fees, which make up 10-20% of its revenue, and the net companies want there to be a review of whether the fees are fair and reasonable.
Skype was added to the Google Pack. It is the second IM/VOIP client in the Pack, although it is used by most for phone service, while Google Talk is used more as for IM. Still, the two will likely be competitors in the future, so Google promoting Skype seems almost short-sighted.
Finally, Gmail has a bunch of new features. They include a link in the top right hand corner that drops down some handy options, and helps clean up the interface, notifications of new items in a conversation while you are replying to other items, as well as some new icons. There’s also a feature that “mutes” a mailing list by hitting the “m” key, sending future emails straight to the archive. Philipp points out, rightly so, that Gmail’s interface is suffering from overload, and needs a housecleaning.
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Word was Google is looking to buy a billion dollars of Clear Channel ad inventory. Quite the gutsy move. Google would have to resell all that inventory at a profit, a billion dollar beta test of its Dmarc/AdSense Audio system, putting a ton of money where its mouth is. Hope the new system is up to snuff.
GAYD (Google Apps For Your Domain, or WPNE, Worst Product Name Ever) rolled out its customized start page, letting those running GAYD create a branded homepage, complete with Google Gadgets.
* - the toast is the little notification box that slides up from the bottom of the screen and then goes away. So named for its similarity to toasted bread, popping up from a toaster.
