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Talk face-to-face right from within Gmail

By Boris
November 11, 2008
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Okay, Google has added Voice and Video Chat right into Gmail. Read all about it here, here and here or log into Gmail and see if Google has activated your account or just watch the video:

With no desktop app and having to install a plugin to get everything working, I can’t help but feel this won’t take off. We’re still waiting for Google to enable voice for gtalk on the desktop!

What do you think?

[poll id="9"]

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  • Email and IM work better than video chat, IMO.

    I've only used video chat to contact my brother who lives on the other side of the globe. And that only in the first month really.

    With email and IM at least you can do other things at the same time.
  • I don't understand why they don't use Flash. It should be possible without installing extra plugins that way.
  • Joost Elfering
    interesting how it seems that google is trying to get into the IM service business. they put the Gtalk as a standard widget onto your iGoogle, still struggling with some issues but it seems like there trying to push something here.

    i think that maybe getting there Gtalk up and running with video and voice first might be a better strategy and them move to a web-based client. from my personal experience a plugin only will work on a small section of all the targeted users, mainly technical users will adopt this more then others. and even then there are the tech people that are fed up with all those plugin's.

    personally... i don't think that this product is mature enough to replace an application like skype in the next year. missing features for stuff like conversations, file sending, administrative commands for chat's and other useful stuff is still missing for Gtalk and this new plugin. i feel that they have a lot of catching up to do.

    a note on what Google does well with there messenger, there trying to create ONE network. so i don't want MSN for my local friends, ICQ for some Americans, AIM for some other people in Germany and Skype for some people in the UK. it is frustrating to have that many messenger accounts.
  • Video conferencing, whiteboarding, multipoint video and voip, desktop sharing and more - Check out Nefsis (www.nefsis.com) which is currently in beta and nobody knows about it yet. It can do 20+ points of video at 30 frames per second and even 720 high definition in software. It is *not* another Flash thing, is the first true parallel processing app for video conferencing and it smokes everything on the market.

    http://www.nefsis.com
  • One thing I find weird: You can chat within gmail and iGoogle. But you can only do video chat in gmail.
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