Google Talkabout

Chat on your iPhone

2008-07-02T17:02:00.000-07:00

Attention iPhone owners! You can now chat with all your Google Talk buddies while on the go. Our new version of Google Talk is designed specifically for the iPhone and runs in the iPhone's browser, so you don't need to download or install anything. Just visit http://www.google.com/talk on your iPhone, sign in, and start chatting. And because it is built for the browser, it will work on today's iPhones as well as on tomorrow's 3G iPhones.

If your businesses, school or organization uses Google Apps, you can instant message using your Google Apps account on your iPhone. From your iPhone's browser, visit http://talkgadget.google.com/a/your-domain.com/talkgadget/m, but be sure to replace 'your-domain.com' with your actual domain name.

Happy mobile chatting!

Leo Dirac,
Product Manager

Bringing the web and desktop together

2008-06-20T09:39:00.000-07:00

The philosophy for the Google Talk team is to enable real time communication where and how people need it, across different platforms, devices, and operating systems. Towards these goals, we have made Google Talk available through web interfaces like Gmail chat and the Google Talk gadget, as well as directly from the desktop through our own downloadable client and via many XMPP clients. We have faced some challenges in keeping the capabilities for each of these versions of Google Talk up to date, and we have heard your feedback on striving towards more feature parity across all versions.

While recently we have spent more time on web integration scenarios, we have also been developing a new client that allows our downloadable and web versions of Google Talk to move forward together more quickly. The Google Talk, Labs Edition release is a sneak peek into this work. Of note in this Labs Edition release is its use of the open source Webkit engine to host the Google Talk gadget. We've used Webkit to bring the Talk gadget out of your browser, and onto your desktop, able to run in the Taskbar. Google Talk, Labs Edition combines “downloadable client behavior”, like stacking notifications and displaying presence outside the browser, with nearly all of the web behaviors of the Google Talk gadget, such as emoticons, multi-user chat, tabbed conversations, etc. It can also natively display web notifications from multiple sources, such as Gmail and calendar alerts and Orkut scrap changes. A few weeks ago we added invisible mode to the Google Talk Gadget, and this functionality immediately extended to Google Talk Labs Edition.

Google Talk, Labs Edition is a first step towards a more unified experience whether you're using Talk through the web or on the desktop. Some of our savvy users may already appreciate the advantages of this approach, and we are confident that the continued improvements being made will translate into a better Google Talk experience for all our users.

Chee Chew
Engineering Director

More Translation Bots!

2008-06-04T12:10:00.000-07:00

Back in December, we released translation bots for Google Talk. While machine translation isn't 100% accurate, the idea of reducing language barriers with automated chat translations appealed to many people, and we received a lot of positive feedback. So when Google Translate recently added new languages, we decided to create chat bots for these languages.

The new bots speak Bulgarian (bg), Croatian (hr), Czech (cs), Danish (da), Finnish (fi), Hindi (hi), Norwegian (no), Polish (pl), Portuguese (pt), Romanian (ro), Swedish (sv) and Traditional Chinese (zh-hant).

There are 26 new bots: bg2en, cs2en, da2en, en2bg, en2cs, en2da, en2fi, en2hi, en2hr, en2no, en2pl, en2pt, en2ro, en2sv, en2zh-hant, fi2en, hi2en, hr2en, no2en, pl2en, pt2en, ro2en, sv2en, zh-hant2en, zh-hant2zh, zh2zh-hant. For reference you can also check out the full list of supported language combinations. To add one of these bots to your contacts, remember to use the following format [from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com.

Toivon, että pidät siitä!

For those that don't know Finnish...

Jonas Lindberg
Software Engineer

New chatback styles

2008-05-06T14:11:00.000-07:00

New chatback badge style examples
One line basic:
Two line basic:
Hyperlink and status icon:	Chat with Itala

We recently added the ability to create Google Talk chatback badges in several new styles. These options are available by clicking on the “Styles” drop down menu when creating a chatback badge. Examples of the new types of formats can be seen on the right.

The two borderless versions of the badge make it easier to fit into your page and customize the appearance as you like. You can just paste the code where you want the link to appear. If you want to further tweak the appearance, you can add some style parameters: Add fontfamily and fontsize to choose a specific font or size, and textcolor and linkcolor to set the colors using a hexadecimal RRGGBB value. You can add these parameters to either the new badge URL or to the iframe's src URL in the generated HTML. You can also use the h and w parameters to specify the height or width of the badge.

For example, &fontfamily=courier%20new&fontsize=13&linkcolor=000000&textcolor=880000 will give you Courier New 13 with black for the link text and dark red for the rest of the text. Here is an example of how this looks with the classic badge:

In addition to providing more flexibility in terms of appearance, chatback can now be used on web sites that don’t allow frames. For these sites, use the new HTML version of the badge. This version can’t display a status messages but it will show your status as a colored circle anywhere you can embed an image. And if you can’t embed an image (like in an email message), you can use the hyperlink by itself or just the URL.

To create a badge, visit http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/New or, if you are a Google Apps user, visit http://www.google.com/talk/service/a/DOMAIN/badge/New replacing DOMAIN with the name of your domain.

Bruce Leban
Software Engineer

New notifications in Google Talk, Labs Edition

2008-04-07T10:40:00.000-07:00

For me, life moves pretty fast, and with so much stuff going on it's easy to have things fall through the cracks. The other day I missed an important meeting because I forgot to open up Google Calendar after restarting my browser (don't tell my manager). Sometimes I just need a little help to stay on top of all the information that breezes by.

Our new experimental release of Google Talk helps solve this problem - it's called Google Talk, Labs Edition. It has all the features of the Google Talk gadget (but runs outside a browser), plus it adds new desktop notifications that remind you of appointments and alert you the moment messages arrive. There are notifications for Google Calendar appointments, Orkut scraps, Gmail messages, and Talk chats (of course). My favorite part? The snooze feature on Calendar notifications! Now I can put off that reminder for a few extra minutes without worrying about forgetting the meeting.

Give Google Talk, Labs Edition a try and let us know what you think!

Jonathan McPhie
Associate Product Manager

Google Talk goes green

2008-04-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

Here at Google, we're committed to helping build a clean energy future and reducing our carbon footprint. And now Google Talk is part of the solution. We don't know about you, but we were surprised to learn the inconvenient truth that every character (byte) we send in a message results in about 0.0000000000000000034 metric tons* of CO2 being released into the atmosphere! So if we can reduce the number of characters we send when we chat with all our friends, we can help the environment at the same time.

Teenagers (and some adults) must be aware of this, because they already reduce their character usage by abbreviating words and dropping vowels when they send IM and SMS (text) messages. We think this is a great idea. If all our millions of users started using IM-speak, we'd save hundreds of millions of wasted (and environmentally damaging!) characters.

For example, if we want to say:
As far as I'm concerned, you can give me the twenty dollars you owe me when I see you later.

You could save more than 50% in wasted characters by saying:
AFAIC, U can gve me the 20 $$ YOM whn I CUL8R.

In honor of Earth Day (3 weeks from today: April 22, 2008), on that day our Google Talk servers will start automatically sending your conversations using IM-speak instead of normal words. But you can help save some computing power (and more wasted energy!) by shortening your conversations yourself.

We know you'll all want to practice your IM-speak, so we're helping by introducing a new translation bot, en2im@bot.talk.google.com, which will translate your conversations into IM-speak, to help you get used to the new lingo. Add this user to your roster, or use our convenient new chatback feature to start a conversation with the bot by clicking the badge below:

You'll be doing your part to help the environment. If you get a message with an abbreviation you don't understand, send just that abbreviation to the bot and it will translate it back. And parents: as a side bonus you'll finally understand what your kids are saying! Kp on chttng, & CUL8R!

The Google Talk Team

* It takes about 2.5 Watts to power a 1Gb/s link [1]. 2.5 Joules/s / 1Gb/s = 2.5e-9 J/b * 8 b/byte = 2e-8 Joules/byte. The average emissions cost of electricity in the United States is 0.605 metric tons of CO2 per MWh [2]. 1MWh is 3.6e9 Joules. So to produce 2e-8 Joules, we emit about 3.36e-18 metric tons of CO2.

[1] C Gunaratne, K Christensen, B Nordman. Managing energy consumption costs in desktop PCs and LAN switches with proxying, split TCP connections, and scaling of link speed. Internation Journal of Network Managment, 15(5), September 2005. See slides

[2] US Department of Energy. Electric Power Annual 2006. Table ES (Divide
total CO2 emissions by total electricity generated.)

Google Talk chatback

2008-02-25T11:23:00.000-08:00

Do you have a blog, online profile, or some other personal web page? Would you like to communicate more with your visitors? Today we're launching a new Google Talk feature that lets visitors to your web site chat with you. We call it "chatback" because instead of you doing all the talking on your blog, your visitors can talk back to you. Sure, they could leave comments, but those are public and hard to use for a real conversation. With chatback, it's a real instant message session.

To use chatback, you must have a Google Talk account ... but your visitors don't have to! They don't even need to have an email address, or to have ever used instant messaging.

When they visit your site, they'll see a badge like the one on the right showing your online status (available, busy, offline) and, if you're available, they can just click and start chatting. Chatback uses the web-based Google Talk Gadget so your visitors don't need to download anything. It opens in a new window so they can keep chatting with you even if they browse to other pages.

Of course, chatback isn't just for blogs. You can use it on any web page that you can add HTML content to. To get started, visit the chatback start page. (This is also linked from the Google Talk homepage.) Then just copy the provided HTML snippet to your web site. Visitors will then see a badge on your site indicating your availability, and can click to start a chat with you. If there's a time when you don't want to be distracted, just set your online status to "busy" and visitors won't be able to chat with you until you change your status back to "available."

If you're not already a Google Talk user, it's easy to become one. If you've got a Gmail account, then you already have a Google Talk account. If not, just go to www.google.com/talk or www.gmail.com to get started.

Bruce Leban
Software Engineer

Try Google Apps Team Edition with Google Talk

2008-02-07T11:41:00.000-08:00

It goes without saying that instant messaging has become integral to communicating in the workplace and at school. Chat helps us to share ideas instantaneously with co-workers and classmates. That's why Google Talk has always been a part of Google Apps, our package of applications built for collaborating within organizations. We're happy to announce today that we've made it even easier for you and your co-workers or classmates to start using Google Apps and Google Talk. It's called Google Apps Team Edition, and if you have an email address from your employer or school, you can sign up right now.

With Google Apps Team Edition, you and members of your organization get Google Docs, for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and Google Calendar, for coordinating your schedule. When you use Google Talk with Google Apps Team Edition, your contacts list will automatically include the other people at your organization using Google Apps Team Edition. And since Team Edition recognizes your connection to co-workers or classmates, it makes sharing documents and calendars easier too. Give it a try by visiting www.google.com/apps.

Bill Kee
Associate Product Marketing Manager

Merry Christmas, God Jul and 圣诞快乐

2007-12-18T17:30:00.000-08:00

OK, I cheated. I don't really speak Chinese. But I know a bot that does, and we're releasing it today together with number of other translation bots. For those not familiar with bots, a (ro)bot is a piece of software that acts as a chat contact and provides some fun or useful functionality.

If you want to try it, just add en2zh@bot.talk.google.com as a friend in Google Talk and send it a message to translate from English to Chinese. You can use it as an interpreter in your group chat, or as a pocket translator in your Google Talk client for BlackBerry.

For more languages, just add any of the 29 23 other translation bots. They're named using two-letter language abbreviations as "[from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com", and the supported language pairs are: ar2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fr2de, fr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, zh2en. So, for French to German translation, talk to fr2de@bot.talk.google.com.

For those of you into programming, why not build your own bot? Maybe a weather service or a rock/paper/scissors game. The Google Talk service uses an open protocol called XMPP, and it's easy to find client libraries and code samples that will give you a flying start. For Java users, check out Ignite Realtime's Smack library. Please note that the Google Talk service enforces traffic limitations on user accounts, so if you want to support more than a few thousand Google Talk users on your bot, connect using the server-to-server protocol (either by making your bot act as an XMPP server or by hosting the bot on your own XMPP server).

Jonas Lindberg
Software Engineer

Update: Our initial list of available bots included some languages that are not actually available. There are 24 bots currently available: ar2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fr2de, fr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, zh2en. As some have guessed, this is a 20% project, and while machine translation isn't perfect, we hope these bots can be helpful in bridging language barriers.

Set your Google Talk picture with a webcam

2007-12-12T16:46:00.000-08:00

Finding a good Google Talk picture can be a real chore. It's hard enough to find a photo of yourself where you're smiling and looking intelligent, without all the additional hassle of cropping, exporting, and manually uploading your picture. So I devoted a few cycles to solving this problem in a fun way. Today, we're launching a way for you to take your Google Talk picture directly from your webcam.

From the Google Talk gadget, click on your Google Talk picture, and select the "Take Photo" option. You'll see the image from your webcam appear, and you'll be able to take and retake pix to your heart's content. When you get that perfect shot, just click "Save" to set it as your picture.

Currently, this feature only works in the Google Talk gadget, but will set your picture across the Google Talk network, including in Gmail.

Have fun, and let us know what you think here.

Justin Uberti
Software Engineer

Google Talk Gadget in 20 new languages

2007-11-26T11:41:00.000-08:00

Today, we added support for 20 more languages to the web-based Google Talk Gadget. The new languages are: Chinese(Simplified), Chinese(Traditional), Danish, Dutch, English(UK), Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese(Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese.

To access the Google Talk Gadget in your language, go to the Google Talk homepage, select your language in the drop-down menu in the top right, and click on the 'launch Google Talk Gadget' link. Or you can simply add the Google Talk gadget to your iGoogle home page.

As usual, we would love to hear your feedback. Anything we can do to improve the experience for your language? Let us know.

Katya Rogers
Software Engineer

Lessons in Building Scalable Systems

2007-09-19T12:06:00.000-07:00

I gave a presentation about the Google Talk Service a while ago at the Google Scalability Conference hosted by Googlers in Seattle. You can watch the video below.

Here is the abstract:
Since launching Google Talk in the summer of 2005, we have integrated the service with two large existing products: Gmail and orkut. Each of these integrations provided unique scalability challenges as we had to handle a sudden large increase in the number of users. Today, Google Talk supports millions of users and handles billions of packets per day. In the presentation, I discuss several practical lessons and key insights from our experience that can be used for any project. These lessons cover both engineering and operational areas.

Posted by Reza Behforooz, Software Engineer

Google Talk Gadget on Google Apps

2007-07-02T17:06:00.000-07:00

If you use Google Apps at your business, organization or school, you can now use the Google Talk Gadget on your Start Page to have chats with colleagues or classmates (including group chats). Google Apps lets your organization create Gmail accounts that use your domain name -- like me@my-organization.com -- instead of @gmail.com in the email address. It also offers collaborative tools, like Google Calendar, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and the customizable Start Page, where all your students, employees, or members can view relevant content, preview their inboxes and calendars, and now, chat with one or more colleagues or classmates -- all from the same webpage.

As a Google Apps user, you can add the Google Talk Gadget to your Start Page by clicking on the "Add stuff" link on the top left corner of your homepage, opening the 'Google Apps' category of gadgets, and clicking 'add it now.' If you're a Google Apps administrator, click here to learn how to add the Google Talk Gadget and other content to your users' Start Page. If your organization doesn't use Google Apps yet, you can learn more about getting started at http://www.google.com/a.

Adam Fass
Software Engineer

Group Chat for the Google Talk Gadget

2007-06-25T10:07:00.001-07:00

We use Google Talk all the time at work to chat with people on our team. It can sometimes be limiting, though, when you want to include multiple people in the conversation, like you can on an email thread or a conference call. That's why we're really excited to announce a new feature for the Google Talk Gadget: group chat. Now, for instance, when the two of us are chatting about an upcoming launch, and we've heard that Seth knows the latest, we can just invite him to join our chat.

To start a group chat, launch the Google Talk Gadget here, and start a chat with one of your friends. Click on the button at the top of the chat window that says "Group Chat," and then pick the name of the third (or fourth, or fifth...) friend you want to invite from the drop-down menu. They'll receive an invitation to join the group chat. If your friends are using Gmail chat or the downloadable Google Talk client, their invitation will launch the Google Talk Gadget.

Rhett Robinson and Qi Ke
Software Engineers

How are you using Talk?

2007-06-08T15:40:00.000-07:00

We focus a lot in this blog on the features we're adding to Google Talk and the technology behind them. But I wanted to share a bit about our users and what they're doing with Google Talk.

As a member of the Google Talk support team, my day is usually busy reading emails reporting issues, troubleshooting, and generally learning about what's up with Google Talk users and how we can make their experience better. Mixed in to the grab bag of technical issues are bits and blurbs from users who can't get enough of Google Talk. Nothing makes my day more than hearing from Google Talk users who enjoy using the product to keep in touch with their friends, families, classmates, fellow online gamers, and business partners. It's inspiring to be a part of something that helps make the world a smaller place.

Reading stories from avid Google Talkers has made me think twice about ways to use the product. Some users have come up with creative ways to help communicate with their contacts and loved ones:

"I'm an exchange student here in Monterrey, Mexico. I'm originally from France and two months ago I left my family and my loved one there. What I like about Google Talk is the MP3 message you get in your Gmail address when someone leaves you a voicemail. You see, my girlfriend works during the day, and with the time difference it's sometimes hard to stay the phone for a long time. So when she's sleeping and I, on the other end of the planet, am not, I leave her Google Talk messages and she listens to them at work during the day, while I am asleep. Also, she can transfer the MP3 messages on her USB device at work and take them home to listen to me if she misses me or she can just connect back to her email address and I'm there! In a way Google Talk helps us keep up our relationship and reduces a bit of the awful distance that separates us." -Olivier, Monterrey, Mexico.

"I am hard-of-hearing and in my daily work activities, and I conduct or
participate in meetings in the form of teleconferences. I dial in on my
desk phone, but I still need help understanding the others on the line, so
I use the Google Talk client for Blackberry.

That's not all. My wife is deaf and she is from an all deaf family. We
keep in touch with each other by using Google Talk for the Blackberry (like
hearing couples tend to use their cell phones) and keep in touch with deaf
family members and many of our deaf friends, no matter which IM client
they choose." - Steve, Dunbar, IA

I also love to read about the zany and fun things people are doing with Google Talk:

"I talk to my 1 year old niece on Google Talk. She lives in North Dakota and I am in Michigan.

She often says things like: jk[-;p//om90, or: .........ff.;;..;. ycv?"C( cc96? C9(?C'?(( (?(?9'"

It is very fun to talk to her via Google Talk. I hear that she runs
upstairs to the computer and says 'Lee lee' (her name for me) when she
hears the incoming chat sound." -Leigh, Commerce, MI

"I met my girlfriend in Abu Dhabi, UAE when I had gone back for my summer vacation. When I came back to the United States to complete my undergrad education, I didn't want to lose contact with her. We speak day and night through Google Talk. I can't count the number of times I've fallen asleep to wake up in the morning with the headset still on my head, and still connected to her." - Carnik, Abu Dhabi, UAE

If you have a story of your own, let us know!

Iris Lu
Online Sales & Ops Coordinator

Something to :) about

2007-05-24T16:10:00.000-07:00

Tired of expressing emotions to your friends with words? Exhausted by the two and sometimes three keys you have to press to enter an emoticon? The Google Talk Gadget has got your back. Today we're introducing an emoticon menu to put those :D and :-( feelings right at your fingertips. We've also heard you asking for a wider emoticon selection, so we added some new choices. You can choose from three different styles of emoticons. Maybe you like things simple and classic . Maybe you like them colorful and fun . Or maybe you're a square . Everybody can be themselves with the Google Talk Gadget, and you'll find it right here.

Jake Knapp
User Interface Designer

Talking with TypePad

2007-05-21T09:42:00.000-07:00

I was excited when the Google Talk Gadget launched in March, since it meant there was one more way to chat with your buddies on the Web -- it let you access Google Talk as a gadget on iGoogle or add it to your own Web page. Today we're pleased that TypePad has syndicated the Google Talk Gadget to their Widget Gallery, and we're looking forward to staying connected with our fellow bloggers. Check it out here: http://www.sixapart.comtypepad/widgets/chat/google-talk.html

Mary Himinkool
New Business Development

Popouts, Buttons and Slideshows

2007-04-03T17:53:00.000-07:00

As an engineer, one of my favorite aspects of delivering Google Talk through the web is that we can enhance it quickly. In fact, we updated the Google Talk Gadget today with a few new features:

(1) To make it easier to use Google Talk anywhere, we made it possible to pop out the Google Talk Gadget into a separate window. If you're using Google Talk on your Google Personalized Homepage, you'll find a link in right inside the gadget that lets you pop it out. You can also find the popout version of the gadget at http://www.google.com/talk .

(2) For website owners and bloggers, we announced earlier that you can add Google Talk to your own webpage with a single line of code. To take advantage of the new pop-out functionality, we created a new way to add Google Talk to your website: a button you can add that lets your visitors launch Google Talk in a separate window.

To add the button, just copy and paste this script into your site's HTML:

(3) We also wanted to highlight a way to use the gadget that others discovered shortly after our first release. If you use Firefox, you can run the gadget in your Firefox sidebar, so it stays open when you navigate from page to page in the main frame. Just click on the link below:

Google Talk Sidebar

You can also bookmark Google Talk for your sidebar in Firefox. Right click on the link above. Select "Bookmark this Link," then "Create In: Bookmarks Toolbar." Next open the Bookmarks menu from the Firefox menu bar, right click on the Google Talk bookmark entry, and select "Properties." In the menu that opens, check the box that says: "Load this bookmark in the sidebar."

When you open the bookmark, the gadget will load in the sidebar on the left.

(4) We also added some new media viewing capability to the gadget. In addition to watching YouTube videos and Picasa Web Albums slideshows, you can now also view Flickr photo slideshows by pasting URLs from Flickr into your chats.

We look forward to adding more and more features to the gadget. And you don't need to do anything to get the updates. Each time you load the gadget you will have the latest version.

Scott Ludwig
Software Engineer

Google Talk Gadget

2007-03-14T14:57:00.000-07:00

We're thrilled to be launching a new way to use Google Talk today. The Google Talk Gadget is a web-based module that you can add to your Google Personalized Homepage, letting you see your friends and chat with them -- all on your homepage.

We know a lot of people love being able to chat with their friends in Gmail Chat, so we created the Talk Gadget to offer that experience in other places, starting with the Google Personalized Homepage. You'll also find all your Gmail and Google Talk contacts organized for you in the Talk Gadget. And just like with Gmail Chat, you don't have to download and install software to use it. One thing we really like is that it looks and feels the same on a Linux desktop as on a Windows laptop, and it also works on Macs. No matter where you go, all you have to do is login to your Google account, and there it is.

And if you have a webpage or blog, you can put the Google Talk Gadget in those places too, so your visitors can sign in and start instant messaging right from your page. If you post your username next to it, visitors can add you as a contact and start chatting with you right away. Like most other gadgets, you can do this by pasting a single line of code into your page, which you can find here.

We worked hard to make the Google Talk Gadget embody the same simple, clean feel of Gmail Chat and the Talk download client--but we threw in some extra goodies too. You'll notice that your conversations all open up in tabs inside the Gadget. And one of the coolest features in the Google Talk Gadget is the ability to do media previews. When we're not busy working on new features for Talk, we're checking out "Ask A Ninja" on YouTube or Friday night's party photos on Picasa Web Albums, sending around links to this multimedia in our chats, and posting them in our status messages. It was just plain silly that our IM client didn't know more about photos and videos other than the fact that it was a link. So by scratching our itch, we can now watch YouTube videos and see Picasa Web Albums photos inside of the Google Talk Gadget anytime someone IMs us a link or sets it as their status message.

So give it a try, let us know what you think, and keep an eye out for lots of improvements to come!

Dudley and Wes Carr
Software Engineers

P.S. Get a sneak peek at the Google Talk Gadget in this short video:

Twittering with Google Talk

2007-02-28T12:54:00.000-08:00

What are you doing right now? It's a pretty simple question. Me? I'm writing this post. Maybe you're "eating a magnolia cupcake," or "at work, but shopping online." Or maybe you're "thinking of how to use the word of the day in a sentence: polypropolene."

Twitter is a site that makes it easy to let the world know what you're doing, and see what other people are up to in a fun, social environment. You can think of it as low-effort mini-blogging. And you can update your status with even less effort by using Google Talk. Just add twitter@twitter.com to your contact list and shoot off an IM to it about how you're "cooking up some spicy chicken jambalaya" or "walking the cat." (Cats can go on walks, too.)

You can also use Talk with Twitter on a mobile device. Using the RIM Blackberry Google Talk Client you can quickly and easily send status updates to Twitter, and we'll all know how you're shoveling yourself out of a foot of snow. Advanced apologies to our NYC office, we've got sun here in Mountain View.

Add twitter@twitter.com to your Google Talk contacts to check it out.

Bill Kee
Associate Product Marketing Manager

Headsets: Making your Google Talk Experience Better

2007-01-17T10:56:00.000-08:00

Using a headset can drastically improve your experience in making a Google Talk voice call.

I've often been in situations where I've tried to make calls to other Google Talk users using only my notebook PC's built-in microphones and speakers. While this works, it's not the best experience. Others around you can hear your conversation. Plus, the other side can hear nasty audio feedback that makes it hard to discern what you're trying to say.

We've tested many headsets on the market and we found three from Plantronics that we liked so much that we even added the Google Talk logo to them. You can purchase these headsets online at the Google Store.

The winning feature: a noise canceling microphone. This eliminates any audio feedback or echos you often get from using your PC's built in microphone and speakers. There are many other headsets you can use as well. You and your caller will appreciate the better sound quality... and prevent those Nosy Nellies around you from eavesdropping on your weekend gossip.

Wesley Chan
Product Manager

Talk on Vista

2007-01-04T11:36:00.000-08:00

You've been asking whether Google Talk will work on Windows Vista. Ask no more -- today we're releasing an update that makes it compatible with Vista. You don't have to do anything -- you'll get the new update automatically -- and whenever you upgrade to Vista, Google Talk will automatically work. We have also posted this new version on the Google Talk download page.

Just like other Windows OSs we support, Google Talk can be installed for all users or just a single user on a Windows Vista computer. In the past, Google Talk installed for all users on a computer by default. However, because of its new security features, the default install on a Vista computer will be for a single user.

Pankaj Kakkar
Software Engineer

How-To Part 6: Search your chat files

2006-11-17T10:22:00.000-08:00

Quick -- can you remember that restaurant your mom recommended or the joke that got three LOLs and a ROTFL? With chat archiving, you don't have to; you can find your chats in your Gmail account using the same search technology that powers Google.com. Watch this to learn about searching for, and finding, Google Talk chats.

Peter Adams
Online Operations Coordinator

How-To Part 5: File transfers

2006-11-16T11:17:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, the sound of your friend's voice or the sight of a favorite smiley may not be enough; you might need to connect by sending along your writing portfolio, or a recording of duck calls, or a video of a guy throwing silly putty from the roof of a parking structure.

In the heat of the moment, we can't anticipate what files you may need to send. That's why you can send any file of any size and type, any time. For more on sending files through Google Talk, watch this.

Peter Adams
Online Operations Coordinator

How-To Part 4: Voicemail

2006-11-15T12:10:00.000-08:00

If your friend is away from his or her computer or not logged in to Google Talk at all, you can leave a voice message which will be converted to an MP3 file and sent to their email account. In fact, if you're too nervous to ask out that special friend via direct conversation or have any other reason to want to deliver a message in not-quite-real-time, you can send it directly to voicemail. Learn how by watching this video.

Peter Adams
Online Operations Coordinator