I’m sure everyone has seen the Google Talk interface within GMail by now. They’re activating it in some weird order — its enabled on all my email accounts but one — the one that I use the most! Anyways, its just a matter of time I guess.

Initial reaction? Well, it works. But so does Meebo, and a host of other web based IM services. So whats new? Clearly, the archival of chat transcripts is a big plus. I wish I had this feature common across ALL my IM accounts. Right now I just have to use Kopete’s history plugin, and keep histories synced across all my different machines with [[http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/|Unison]] and its a pain.

But its good to see that Google is trying hard to open up Google talk. I just checked whether I could add my Google Talk account to my regular Jabber account (@jabber.org) and it works! And with all the work behind [[http://code.google.com/apis/talk/about.html|libjingle]], soon all of the IMs would be able to provide voice chat through a single, open, standardized protocol (I believe Kopete already has implemented support for Jingle in their development branch). I wonder how Skype will react to this development — my guess is that they will emphasize more on the telephony and VoIP aspects of their service.