by Lee Mathews on March 30, 2011 at 09:30 AM

Bots -- like the kind which automate IRC rooms and Google Wave -- are a good thing to know about. There are plenty of useful bots worth knowing about, too, including the Google Talk Guru.
Just add guru@googlelabs.com to your GTalk buddies, and you can start firing off questions. Lifehacker suggests that the same types of queries supported by Google SMS will work, though we didn't have any luck ...
by Sebastian Anthony on November 12, 2010 at 12:30 PM

Must-have smartphone apps are few and far between. In fact, it's hard to name more than two apps that I use on a daily basis: Angry Birds is the first, of course, and BeejiveIM is the second.
I reviewed BeejiveIM for Android last month and came away with the conclusion that it's almost faultless. The interface is smooth, and you can customize colors and backgrounds to your heart's content. ...
by Sebastian Anthony on October 19, 2010 at 01:30 PM

I always had one rather large complaint about Fring and other multi-network messengers: they're dog-ugly -- like, Ugliest Dog In The World ugly. Fortunately there's a beautiful alternative that, until now, has only been available for iPhone and BlackBerry: it's called BeejiveIM, and after you try it every other messenger app on Android will fade into clumsy and ugly insignificance.
From the ...
by Jay Hathaway on August 16, 2010 at 06:00 PM

Multi-protocol IM over the Web is a great thing. You can be on your home machine, your work machine, or a borrowed laptop, and your contact lists and chat history are right there where you left them. IM+ for Web is a Web app version of the popular IM+ mobile client, and I can't help comparing it to the other major player in this space, Meebo.
I've been using Meebo for quite a while, and, while ...
by Jay Hathaway on December 3, 2009 at 11:00 AM

There are plenty of competing chat apps for iPhone and Android, but BlackBerry users have, thus far, been left out in the cold in terms of multi-service chat clients. Nimbuzz is stepping in to plug that hole, though, with a BlackBerry-native app that allows you to chat over AIM, Gtalk, MSN, Skype, Facebook and more.
Being a native app means Nimbuzz can run in the background and take advantage ...
by Jay Hathaway on August 19, 2009 at 11:00 AM

Pidgin, a popular, crossplatform, multi-protocol chat app, just got an important update to version 2.6. It's important because this is the first time Pidgin has supported audio or video chat over Google Talk. Even my favorite chat client for the Mac, Adium, doesn't yet support those features. Unfortunately, audio and video chats don't yet work in the Windows version of Pidgin, but they should be ...
by Nik Fletcher on November 11, 2008 at 04:15 PM

It's been over two years since Google brought text-only Chat to the Gmail web interface: and whilst the feature has certainly seen a number of small additions in that time, I think it's fairly safe to say that the efforts with Chat to date will pale into insignificance with Google's announcement on the Gmail blog that Video and Audio chat will shortly be arriving in an inbox near you. The ...
by Brad Linder on June 28, 2008 at 12:00 PM

When we first looked at Zenbe two months ago, the service was still in private beta. Now anyone can sign up for Zenbe. The company has also added several new features that help transform the service from a simple webmail client to a personalized start page. For example, you can now sign into Google Talk and Twitter in the Quick View area on the right side of the page. This lets you chat with ...
by Brad Linder on May 16, 2008 at 06:30 PM

Your co-workers use MSN Messenger, your family is partial to AOL Instant Messenger, and your friends use Google Talk. There are plenty of utilities that let you keep in touch with all of your contacts regardless of the IM platform they're using. But while we love Digsby, Trillian, Pidgin, and Adium most of the time, there are a few features missing from those apps:
Support for voice and video ...
by Todd Ritter on March 25, 2008 at 04:00 PM

While Google's GTalk messaging application is currently Windows only, shankri-la points out that similar functionality can be achieved by using Mozilla's beta project, Prism, to create a standalone web application. After Prism is installed, run the program and enter the following line as the application URL: https://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/client Next, give your application a name like ...
by Chris Gilmer on December 19, 2007 at 01:00 PM

GTalk Profile is a site for finding Google Talk related profiles that makes use of the recently launched Google Profiles. GTalk Profile uses the Google Maps API to pinpoint locations of users worldwide. Each pinpoint has a link to a users Google Profile, including their interests, location and profile photo. The site is relatively young, but there are already over 7400 users that have chosen to ...
by Nik Fletcher on July 4, 2007 at 10:00 AM

On Friday, we wrote about the iPhoneChat application that allowed you to do AOL Instant Messaging from the iPhone. Today, however, we can go one better: AIM, Jabber (GTalk), MSN, Yahoo! and even ICQ for your iPhone. Meebo offers an IM-aggregation service via the web, however what's great about this apparently new service is that you don't need to be registered with Meebo to be able to sign in. You ...
by Brad Linder on June 25, 2007 at 09:45 AM

TechCrunch is reporting that Google will acquire GrandCentral (or already has). GrandCentral's tag line is "one phone number for life." Basically, the service provides you with a single phone number that can be linked to every other phone in your life, including home, work, mobile, you name it. When you get a call on your single number, you can pick up any phone to answer. All of your voicemail ...
by Dolores Parker on May 10, 2007 at 09:30 AM

You are reading this post about Twitter. That's what you would answer to Twitter's simple question, "What are you doing?", which is the entire premise of Twitter's existence. Getting people to answer in 140 characters or less, by IM or logging onto Twitter.com, what it is they are doing at that particular moment. Big stuff, right? Constant stream of consciousness chatter is the lifeforce of ...
by Jordan Running on December 21, 2006 at 02:45 PM

Today marks the one-year anniversary of what could have been a great milestone between AOL and Google."'Could have been'?" you ask? Well, one year ago today the two internet giants announced a $1 billion deal that put 5% of Google AOL in AOL Google's pocket. One result they promised was that the companies' instant messaging products, Google Talk and AIM, would be interoperable, allowing Google ...