Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Google Talk Gadget

There’s a new (and official) personalized homepage gadget in town: Google Talk. It’s quite nice, and after a quick trial I have to say I prefer this to both desktop Google Talk, as well as Gmail’s Google Chat alternative. You can chat with people from your contact list, displayed as the first tab, who will then be added as additional tabs. And because Google gadgets aren’t restricted to the Google homepage, you can also grab the code for your blog or other homepage... I’ve included this below for the time being:

[Edit: I removed the gadget again, but you can see a standalone web version at this URL.]

This isn’t perfectly bug-free yet, though. Some of my smileys got lost, my friend says his avatar that is showing on my screen is completely outdated and was replaced a long time ago, thanks to the use of Flash the gadget settings menu was overlaid by the chat window (I wanted to try turning off the sound effects), and I had some trouble pasting a URL into the chat box. Other than those small quirks, I found this to work really smooth.

I wonder if Google will throw in advertisement in the future to make some money from all this chat traffic? (Ads targeted to whatever you’re chatting about with your friends, that is.)

Join the ongoing comments.

[Thanks Haochi!]

Google Talk Gadget by Philipp Lenssen

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