E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Google’s Move into IM Is Actually a Good Move

(Migrated weblog post from LSR)

The hype from Google Talk continues. Today Technorati is indicating there have been 8,220 posts about “Google Talk”. Pretty impressive considering that Google‘s new IM offering has been in the market for just a couple of days.

The interesting thing about this new IM client release is probably not the fact that it is coming from such a company as Google or that it basically does not add substantially anything new to the myriads of VoIP / IM clients already available, but the fact that it has been a massive wake-up call for a number of different VoIP / IM clients. And if not check out this TechnologyReview article: Google’s Move into IM where it is clearly indicated that the biggest thing that could happen with Google Talk is the fact that other competitors will wake up and react to the move.

Yes, the article mentions Skype specifically, as the main competitor to Google Talk that has taken things seriously enough to make some further announcements about opening up Skype in order to help improve its many features available and still continue to be ahead of the rest of the competition, which, in my opinion, still is and big time !

And I think that this is where the true power from Google Talk lies. The fact that it has woken up other VoIP / IM giants and actually that would make them even stronger and much more competitive that what they may be already. So somehow and pretty much like we have seen it with the web browser war I think we are about to enter a much fiercer battle between giants like Skype and everything else. Whether that everything else may be, including Google Talk or not. So we have got some very interesting times ahead of us, folks. Stay tuned or you will miss out !

Best Definition of What Weblogging Is All About

(Migrated weblog post from LSR)

A colleague of mine from work forwarded to me during the week a cartoon that as soon as I saw it I just couldn’t help laughing because of how true the story actually is. As the title of this weblog indicates this is probably one of the best definitions of what weblogging is all about and since a picture is worth while a thousand words here you have got the cartoon without any further comments:

Pretty good, eh?

Google Talk – Is It Really Worth While All the Fuss ? Maybe not

(Migrated weblog post from LSR)

And the hype goes up, up, up and higher up, folks ! If yesterday I was mentioning that there were plenty of weblog posts around the latest IM client available, Google Talk, going with 4,671 weblog posts, now the current list of weblog posts (7,224 posts) nearly doubles yesterday’s figures. Amazing !

However, the interesting part is when you try to figure out what is actually happening out there in the Blogosphere about the so called overhyped Google Talk. Allow me to explain. Like I have mentioned above there are about 7,224 posts around the topic of GTalk, so it looks like everybody seems to be quite happy with the latest offering from Google, however, about only 21 weblog posts do mention one of the main key items that I talked about yesterday that I was not really pleased with: the lack of security features.

Indeed, quite a few of those weblog posts shared lots of information about some of the great and neat features from GTalk. Yet, only a few did dare to mention that in this first release this application does not encrypt both the messaging and the voice chats. Thus you are out in the open and unprotected. WOW! That is just really incredible to believe that very few people in the Blogosphere has been talking about this, specially when you come to think about the huge amount of discussions and heated arguments that have been taken place for quite some time about using a secure and reliable web browser like FireFox or Opera as opposed to IE. Yet, hardly anybody seems to be worried about the fact that GTalk does not encrypt your chats and therefore it exposes you in the same way that other insecure browsers do. Isn’t that nice ?

So what is the deal ? Is it that everything that Google does is fully sanctioned by end-users, regardless of what it may be, and therefore gets used and talked about as if nothing happens, like it has taken place before with some of its other offerings ? That, indeed, seems to be the case, except for those other folks that just want more: a secured and encrypted real-time collaboration environment where they could talk with colleagues, friends and family as they could do using other alternatives. And by the looks of it we are going to have to wait for quite some time before that may change.

According to Robin Good “Google Talk does not yet support encryption of chats or calls in this early Beta version though it promises to fully support them in its final release”. If that is the case it sounds like it would be quite some time gone by before we can actually use GTalk in a secured environment, specially to collaborate closer with our colleagues while sharing potential sensitive information, even more when we get to see how long have some Google Betas been running for. Thus in the end GTalk would a very good and perfect option for some chitchat but I bet that for talking business related issues or other sensitive bits and pieces of information it would not be ready. Not now and potentially not in a little while. We will just have to wait and see how that turns out to be. And, hopefully, this time around it will not take such a long time as with other offerings.