More emphasis on the Gmail plug-in and no mention of the Talk gadget.
http://www.google.com/talk/
It used to look like this: http://74.6.239.67/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Ftalk%2F&fr=moz2&u=www.google.com/talk/&d=KjMxMQ-YSS7b&icp=1&.intl=us |
Strange, That means Google will reduse the devolopment of GTalk. another Future Shut Down Product |
I wouldn't presume GTalk is going anywhere – I think Google are just abandoning the idea of a stand alone IM client. Makes a lot of sense, with the promise of IM becoming the new email never really taking off thanks (largely) to the closed IM federations of Yahoo / MSN / AOL.
Twitter shows that an open, public approach is more useful, and for private conversations context seem to be more important. In Android GTalk is very tightly built in, same with Latitude, iGoogle, GMail, Google Docs, etc. I see them making instant messaging a basic part of the 'social' strategy, so I expect to see it being a built in part of all of Google's apps in the future. |
Imagine what kind of social network would be Gmail + iGoogle + Websites with the Social Bar (integrating Gtalk, Latitude, and the future "micro-blogging service by Google") |
Google talk clients: – windows client (the original) – another windows client (flash based) – gmail – google gadget
it's a bit of a mess. They all have different feature sets. Does google even know what they are doing? |