Google Talk on the Desktops

I’ve been in a bunch of meetings and presentations today.  As you all know, Google announced the beta of Google Talk.  My impressions of the product are what you’ve probably read from others. Clean interface, good compression, etc, etc.

Here’s what I’ve seen today with respect to GoogleTalk.  In 6 presentations/desktops, all of these folks (geeks) had downloaded the product and it was on the desktop.

Question one: What are you using today? 5 had Skype, one used Yahoo.

Question two: Why’d ya download it? All said, more or less, “cuz its Google”

All of these folks (except my Yahoo friend) said they had downloaded it and would keep it on the desktop in case others called, etc. None of them said they were dumping Skype or anything else to switch to Google.

My Yahoo bud, loved the compression and sent out invites for others to join him.

This will be interesting to see in six months from the perspective of what numbers get tossed around.  I suspect we will see downloads being tossed around but watching who switches from what to what, will also be interesting.

For your start up: Lock down the name of your company (“newco_support”) in every service so you can have all of them consistent, regardless of what service your customers use. Google Talk just means yet another way for customers to talk to you.

Comments

[Matt]

I use gaim. Which means that, once I finally found the help page that _really_ tells you how to configure another client to work with it (there are at least two other help pages which _claim_ to tell you how to do that, but leave out critical information), I just added Google Talk's jabber server as another account among many. One client. All services. This is essentially chat nirvana. (Not to mention that, unlike Google's own client, it doesn't require me to pollute my machine with Windoze.)

Of course, I haven't sent any traffic over it yet, since nobody I know is using it as a primary means of contact...but I'm ready if and when they do.