Googlified

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.

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).

Google has tons of pranks for this year’s April Fool’s Day, including Gmail Custom Time, Virgle: The Adventure of Many Lifetimes, Google Wake Up Kit, and more!

• Gmail Custom Time: It enables you to send email back until April 1, 2004.
• Google Human Search (Chinese): searches 250 million volunteers by their personal characteristics.
• Virgle: Virgin and Google team up together to create Project Virgle to build a second Earth on Mars - just in case Earth gives up on us - in the next 100 years.
• Google Wake Up Kit - The kit from Google Calendar is designed to wake you up by whatever means possible - including “a bed-flipping device … for forceful removal from your sleeping quarters.” Google Calendar also added a “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that sets you up for dates with celebrities.
• gDay - Brought to you by the Google Australia team, it let’s you to search contents on the Internet even before it’s created! - “Hi guys, I am from the future.”
• Scratch-and-sniff books - Google Books is “now able to capture some of the smells during the scanning process” and you can smell them in the preview pages!
• Greener Google Talk: To reduce the amount carbon dioxide produced by instant messaging, Google Talk will now shorten the number of characters used in a IM message by “abbreviating words and dropping vowels” - the so-called IM-speak.
• Google Dajare (Japanese): The mission of this project is “to organize the world’s laughter, (allow) people around the world (to) have access to what(ever) they want.”
• YTRickRollsYou - “We’re no strangers to love, You know the rules and so do I … Never gonna give you up, Never gonna let you down … We’ve know each other for so long” - click on any feature videos on YouTube (no, this is not rickroll).
• Google Cash (Russian) - Now you can install the Google Cash portable right from your office or home and make payments for advertising cash roubles - designed exclusively for Russian AdWords users. (I thought the machine is designed to print money to pay for the users’ online advertising campaigns…)
• Yogurt: the new Orkut!
• Google Docs Airplane: Stop typing the boring documents, fold an airplane instead! Go to Google Docs and create a “New airlane!“
• Google Weblogs - New service from Blogger that “Publish text to the web in reverse chronological order.” OMG, this is going to be SO COOL!
• AdSense for Conversation: AdSense will display ads that are relevant to the conversations that you engage in on a headgear that Google provides for you to wear. Also AdSense for Phone Calls (Portuguese).
• FrankRank: a new AdWords ranking algorithm inspired by Frank the hand turkey.

Happy April Fool’s Day everyone! :)

Only a few days after introducing the invisible mode in Gmail Chat, the Google Talk team added another great feature into the application - Chatback Badge. According to Google, “[a] Google Talk chatback badge will let visitors to your web page chat with you. They’ll be able to chat with you whenever you’re signed in to Google Talk.” Google’s description is not exactly true, but good enough. You will have to approve the chat request before the person can chat with you.

The process goes like: visitor click on the link to chat with you, a Google Talk Gadget opens for the person -> Google Talk will notify you and ask whether you would like to join the chat, providing a link to Google Talk Gadget, which will open in the browser.

The guest can remain in complete anonymous. Yes, this is the Internet, but I would still want to know who I am talking to, even if the person is lying. (ZOMG, pedobear is talking to me!) So guess what? I would like the guests to enter their names first, sort of like GrandCentral, and I hope that they would allow chatting inside the IM client, without using the Google Talk Gadget.

Luka from Zorgloob said that these chats are off the record, meaning that they aren’t stored in Gmail even if you have the option enabled. Also, he noticed that “chat are not merged if you have more than one person contacting you. It is not chat rooms.”

Having someone (an emotionless cluster of computers controlled by a team of Googlers) telling me that I am invisible every morning is just (effing) great.

[via the Google Blogoscoped forum]

Google added a new feature to Gmail Chats recently that allows users to change their presence status to “invisible”. When you set your presence status to Invisible, you will be appear as Offline to your contacts but you will still be able to chat with the people you want to chat with.

(At least that’s how it should work, although it never seem to work for me. Whenever I set my status to Invisible, my contacts will still be able to see me and be like, “No, you are ONLINE!”)

If you are using Gmail Chat and a desktop IM client at the same time, you will probably see a warning message when switching to Invisible: “Oops! You are not invisible because you’re also using desktop software that doesn’t support invisibility, such as Google Talk.”

I remember I poked fun at Harry Potter’s invisible cloak last week, can’t remember what it was though. Lulz.

[photo by Phoebe Epstein, used under a CC-license; via Google Blogoscoped forum]

Google Talk launched two dozen of translation bots yesterday that you add to your Google Talk contact list and use them to translate between languages on the fly. For example, the translation bot de2en@bot.talk.google.com is German to English, and en2fr@bot.talk.google.com will translate English inputs into French. You can find a list of 24 language pairs that the bots support on Google Operating System.

Comparing to Google Translate, this feature is really wonderful when you need to translate a lot of vocabularies. The downside is that you will need to add a lot of these bots to your contact list if you need to translate between several languages. A better approach, in my opinion, is that they should identify the input languages, like this Language Identifier on Xerox’s website. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great, but there are always room for improvement.

The Google Talk gadget now has a feature that allows users to take photos for their avatars directly from the webcam, Justin Uberti announced on Google’s Talkabout Blog.

To take a photo, click on your Google Talk picture in the Google Talk gadget, then select the “Take Photo” option. A new window will pop up and from there you should be able to see yourself (or whatever your webcam’s capturing at the time). Clicking on the “Take Photo” button will, well, take the photo. If you don’t like the photo, click on the X button on the top-right corner and retake the photo. Once you have the right one, click on Save and the application will “set your picture across the Google Talk network, including in Gmail.”

Smile. :)

It’s for real this time, you can now chat with your buddies on AIM in Gmail Chat, as spotted by a reader of Google Operating System last month. Google is currently slowly rolling out this new feature to IE7 and Firefox 2 users with English as their language in Gmail.

You should be seeing an option in the Settings page under the Chat tab where you can sign into AIM if Gmail already had this feature enabled for you. If not, you can just sit back and wait for a few days, or give it a shot to see if changing your language setting in Gmail and the browser will work - as you are so eager to see it. :)

Your contacts from AIM will have the little icon next to the name when the person is online.

I think that Google Talk (desktop and the flash version) will also include this feature on their next release. Believe or not, Austin is the only person I have on AIM. :)

Ionut of Google Operating System has some screen shots suggesting that AIM is coming to Gmail as part of the Chat feature, and potentially Google Talk.

We have been talking about AIM coming to GTalk since Google invested $1 billion in AOL two years ago. Part of the agreement states that they will enable toe communication between AIM and Google Talk, “provided certain conditions are met.”

We waited, and waited.

Earlier this year, Googler Justin Uberti, who worked on AIM at AOL for 9 years and now working on integrating AIM and GTalk, said that it “should be available in the near future.” And last month, celebrating his first Googleversary, he posted on his blog that he’s now working on an “extra-awesome” project.

The last time I check, there’s only one contact in my AIM, who goes to school with me.

*Oh, Google also has a deal with Skype…

[screenshots from Google Operating System]

Google Talk finally gets the group chat feature. Hmm, more accurately, it’s the Google Talk Gadget that gets this frequent requested feature, but I guess it will be soon be on the desktop client.

Perhaps it will, along with video conferencing.

[via Google Operating System]

Google Talk has finally got some cuter and more colorfull smileys. Well, at least for the Google Talk Gadget for now, but I am pretty sure that they will add to desktop version of Google Talk soon. Just as the oldie but goodie smileys on Google Chat, the smileys on the new sets are also animated.

I love the smiley. LOL

Looks like making phone calls from Google Talk is just inches away. From a presentation for the Google Apps (find the screen shot under the Google Talk section), Sander spotted a screen shot of Google Talk displaying “Show dialpad“, and “Enter a name or phone number“.

Hey, that’s so obvious, we can make phone calls within Google Talk! :)

Hmm, don’t get so excited yet… Will the service be free and available worldwide?

*The page has been taken down by Google.

As a translator for Google, Martin was able to see some upcoming features for Google services. He found some hints today that Google is working to add multi-user conference feature to Google Chat/Talk, and will integrate with AIM.

Phrase in English: NAME has joined
Translation Help: System messages when user join or left a muc conversation
—————————————–
Phrase in English: NAME will be removed from your AIM buddy list.

From the context, I can guess that MUC stands for Multi-user conversation… (nay, I am not that smart, it’s Philipp. hehe)

[via Google Blogoscoped]