Google Talk

[Kolzig]

http://www.google.com/talk/

They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free. Google Talk enables you to call or send instant messages to your friends for free–anytime, anywhere in the world. Google Talk offers you:

• Choice: Get in touch how and when you want to–over email, IM or a call
  
• Quality: Talk through your computer but hear your friends as if they were in the same room
  
• Convenience: Your Gmail contacts are pre-loaded into Google Talk so inviting or talking to your friends is just a click away
  

Google Talk is in beta and requires a Gmail username and password.

So what's next? Google OS?

[Redwall]

[Nick]

The voice thing is quite good, but only because you can switch your voice channel to wav and then use it to play tunes to people. Instead of saying "you got to hear this tune" and then having to send a file across or whatever.

[Tanukitsune]

I think it's great since everbody and their dog has an account, you can chat with any friend you want!

[Marek]

Google is slowly taking over the world. But... they're doing good to the internet. This Google Talk thing runs on the Jabber open standard, which means it could give rise to tons of new Jabber clients and maybe even result in a universally accepted IM protocol (much like how WWW, Usenet, IRC, e-mail etc. are universal). That's a Good Thing.