google talk logo

I don’t even remember when was the desktop version of Google Talk updated, but it was certainly many moons ago. Well, the Google Talk team just released a “Labs Edition” of Google Talk, which is pretty much the desktop version of Google Talk Gadget with notification for new messages from Google Calendar and Orkut, in additional to Gmail in the original Google Talk.

google talk labs edition

As I have just said, the Labs Edition is pretty much like the Google Talk Gadget, which allows group chat and fancier emoticons. However, this released removed useful features like File Transfer and Voicemail, but as the FAQ explains, “Labs Edition is an experimental release that brings some of the great features of the Google Talk Gadget to the desktop. Some features like voice calling and file transfer from the Google Talk client did not make it into this version.”

I am going to stick with Pidgin for now - for one, I don’t like MSN, two, (the stable version of) Google Talk doesn’t have group chat, and three, I don’t feel like opening all these IMs.

On a related note, Google discontinued the Music Trends service for Google Talk (that only a handful of people use).