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Friday Jul 06, 2007

Google Talk

Google Talk is a computer application for Voice over IP and instant messaging, offered by Google. The Google Talk client is currently only available for Windows, but with the release of the Google Talk gadget, a user on any operating system with a web browser can use Google Talk. However, other XMPP clients, such as Pidgin, fully support other operating systems.

 

Gmail received chat functionality, and was integrated with Google Talk. Users can send instant messages to other Gmail users. Google Talk does not need to be downloaded to send instant messages to Gmail users. The conversation logs are automatically saved to a Chats area in the user's Gmail account. This allows users to search within their chat logs easily, and to have them centrally stored on the Internet, which has caused concerns that intelligence agency may exploit this fact to gather information.

 

Instant messaging between the Google Talk servers and its clients uses an open protocol, XMPP, allowing users of other XMPP clients to communicate with Google Talk users. VoIP in Google Talk is based around the Jingle protocol. The technology used within the Google server network however is not publicly known. The connection between the Google Talk client and the Google Talk server is encrypted, except when using Gmail's chat over HTTP, a federated network that doesn't support encryption, or when using a proxy like IMLogic. End-to-end messages are unencrypted. Google plans to add support for chat and call encryption in a future release. Some XMPP clients natively support encryption with Google Talk's servers.

 

Google added voicemail and file sending capabilities to the Google Talk client. Voicemail messages can be 10 minutes long, and they're delivered to the contact's Gmail mailbox as an attached MP3 file. It is also possible to display the song currently playing on the computer. This music data is collected, if the user agrees to this, and displayed on the Google Music Trends page. Google also introduced offline messaging to Google Talk. This allows users to send messages to their contacts, even if they are not signed in. They will receive the messages when they next go online.

 

There are some bugs for Google Talks as well. When incorporating "Google Apps for your Domain" Service and Google Talk together, the "Check Inbox" function within Google Talk Program is not working properly. There have also been several bugs reported in the Windows client for Google Talk, including e-mail message-notification unreliability, taskbar notification problems during conversations with more than one contact, and tab-sizing problems. Also it appeared that using the escape key to close chat windows does not work if the window has been open for a moderate amount of time. Similarly, the buddy list window, if left un-minimized for a length of time, would automatically "maximize" (to the same size), and would have to be "restored" with Windows in order to minimize once again. Another bug that had been noticed was a buddy list malfunction. All users will intermittently appear offline in the Google Talk client regardless of their actual status. Another problem with the Google Talk client reported by numerous users is its tendency to freeze occasionally for one to two minutes, using 100% CPU power. This is most common during a long conversation. A bug that has appeared in version 1.0.0.100 is that in the menu, "Check for mail" item randomly disappears, leaving you without the ability to check for new e-mail in your Gmail. Restarting the program restores it. Memory leaks are also a problem and remain in the current version. Google stated to fix all of these bugs. However, some users are reporting that the offline contact bug in Google Talk still continues.

Posted at 01:38PM Jul 06, 2007 by Xuan Zhang in IM  | 

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