A review of Google Talk that I’ve heard echoes of elsewhere:
Google Talk has launched, and I’ll give you my mini-review right now. Welcome to the Stone Age of instant messaging!
Google Talk is clean and easy to use. It’s also absent almost every feature found in other IM clients. Want to send a file? Pshaw! Want to have a group chat? You’re too social! Want to view your previous chat sessions easily? Get outta here! Want little emoticons? Skins? Go bug somebody else! Google Talk is Spartan in the way that the Lacedemonians were Spartan: it seems ancient!
You know what? I really don’t care.
Fact is, I don’t want to send files via IM. Sending files via IM is one reason why IM is banned in most companies. It’s a huge security hole. When I want to send a file, I use e-mail. I realize that’s very 2000, but there you go.
Group chat? Not something I do. I am sure there are folks who do. I’m not one of them.
Emoticons? Frankly, I’ve grown weary of endless expansion of the emoticon lists in various IM clients, sometimes including, unbelievably, pay-for emoticons. I’m also irked by subtle differences between the emoticons of different IM clients, which render what’s really being emoted ambiguous. I don’t want to learn to read body language in my IM client. I like that Google Talk sees emoticons, and highlights/bolds them, but doesn’t interpret them into more elaborate customized animated images.
Hell, I’m tired of entering “(a)” and “(b)” to illustrate points in MSN Messenger and having them changed into an angel and a beer stein.
Chat logs? Some clients don’t track previous chats at all, though Google appears to. It’s presently clumsy to do, but, well, damn, this is a beta, folks, and free; I suspect that functionality will show up Real Soon Now. I’ve needed to reference back to a previous IM chat twice in the last two years, so this isn’t a huge thing to me.
Maybe the problem is that, while I use IM on occasion (most of all inside of CoH, but occasionally in real life), it’s not a central focus of my social life. Just like the phone. I don’t need canned laughter (emoticons), I don’t need group chat (conference calling). I don’t need recordings of my phone calls (chat logs) to see what was previously said. I don’t need — well, whatever the equivalent of sending files would be on phones.
Maybe the problem is that I originally started using IM back on an old VM/CMS mainframe system, where — basically — we could send a text message. Emoticons hadn’t even been invented yet. Hell, we’d just gotten rid of the cuneiform tablets the week before … but, at any rate, my initial expectations were low, and they really haven’t increased since then.
IM is, for me, something easier and more real-time than e-mail, but less demanding than phone calls. Google Talk does that just fine, and if it were the only IM client in the world, I would shed very few tears.
Or, as someone else has said:
While Google Talk has nothing that special really, it?s already my IM of choice because it has less to dislike than the other chat apps I?ve tried. Better to be clutter-free and simple than to have some good features along with a dozen you feel like turning off.
Now if only I can figure out a way to get my remaining MSN Messenger correspondents to make use of it. That would get rid of one of the other three IM clients I have to maintain …
Hear! Hear!
In spite of the rousing chorus of “it’s so featureless” from the geeky crowd, I’m excited by its lack of crap. And I really do think that the combination of its ease-of-installation/use and the instant talk feature will be a hit with non-techies. It’s only been out a couple of days and already my daughter and almost every one of her school chums have ditched AIM for G-Talk. (You don’t know how big a deal this is…I’ve been trying to get her to stop using that spyware-laden, piece-of-crap software forever!)
I have sometimes considered installing AIM — there are a lot of folks who use it — but have always shied away from involvement with *anything* having to do with AOL. *shudders*
The Yahoo! IM interface isn’t too bad, once you turn off all the bells and whistles. But Google’s really rocks.
I haven’t tried the voice feature. I’ll have to give it a stab sometime . Maybe I should install Google Talk on Margie’s machine, and we can chat-chat that way.
Ahh, the dream of a crapless application! Google, don’t lose your vision! We’re counting on you! (Re: previous post and comment)
Hey, look — everything that’s wrong with MSN Messenger is touted as a feature (though, to be fair, they express some admiration for Google Talk’s strengths).
Or, as PC World says:
Most applications are defined by what they do. Google’s new Google Talk instant messaging/voice chat program, on the other hand, gets its personality from what it doesn’t even try to do. It won’t turn your emoticons into fancy smileys. (Hey, it doesn’t even let you change the font size at the moment.) It doesn’t pelt you with ads for movies you don’t want to see. You can’t use it to transfer files or play games, and it’ll never, ever pop up a window with news about Jessica Simpson. In short, this is chat stripped to its essence — and while there’s absolutely nothing innovative about this program, its utter straightforwardness is kind of refreshing.