Posted by Mike Jazayeri, Senior Product
Manager
Millions of users chat on the Google Talk network every day, and
chatting via Gmail chat is by far the most popular way. People tell
us they love the convenience and simplicity of having access to
their buddies right within the Gmail interface. In fact, for many
users, Gmail chat was their first introduction to the world of
instant messaging.
We've been working with AOL on ways to let our users talk to
their buddies on the AIM network, and I'm delighted to announce
that the fruits of that labor are
href="http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/gmail-chat-aim-crazy-delicious.html" >
live. Starting today, Gmail users can sign into their AIM
accounts via Gmail chat and talk with AIM buddies just as they do
with their Google Talk friends. Best of all, the features you love
most about Gmail chat, such as chat history and automatic sorting
of your buddies based on frequency of communication, work
seamlessly across your Google and AIM buddies. This is rolling out
in the newest English version of Gmail today and will be available
in other languages soon.
A big thank you to our friends at AOL who worked closely with our
engineering team to make this possible–and who we can now chat
with while in Gmail. :)
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Tags: , Jazayeri, ManagerMillions, Mike, Posted, product, Senior, users
Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet, Product
Manager, and Mike LeBeau, Software Engineer
In case you hadn't heard, a few months back we launched
href="http://www.google.com/mobile/goog411/index.html" >1-800-GOOG-411
(1-800-466-4411) in the U.S. It's a free telephone service that
lets you search for businesses by voice and get connected to those
businesses for free.
Today, your GOOG-411 experience just got better: during your call
to GOOG-411, just say "map it", and you'll get a text
message with the details of your search plus a link to a map of
your results right on your mobile phone.
Try it out, and add us to your phone book while you're at it.
Let us know what you think either by
href="mailto:labs goog411@google.com" >emailing us or by joining
our discussion
group.
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Tags: , Arnaud, LeBeau, manager, Mike, Posted, product, Sahuguet
Posted by Mike Jazayeri, Product
Manager, Google Talk
We've just announced
href="http://www.google.com/talk/developer.html#service" >open
federation for the Google Talk service. What does that mean,
you might be wondering. No, it has nothing to do with Star Trek.
"Open federation" is technical jargon for when people on
different services can talk to each other. For example, email is a
federated system. You might have a .edu address and I have a Gmail
address, but you and I can still exchange email. The same for the
phone: there's nothing that prevents Cingular users from
talking to Sprint users.
Unfortunately, this is not the case with many IM and Internet voice
calling services today. You can only talk to people on the
particular service you have an account on (so you need an account
on every service to talk to everybody, which is pretty cumbersome).
With open federation, you get to choose your service provider and
you can talk to people on any other federated service (and vice
versa).
In addition to the Google Talk service, many other companies,
universities, and corporations support open federation today. This
means you can now talk to millions of users around the world all
with a single account on the service provider of your choice.
We think this is pretty exciting — though perhaps not as exciting
as something
href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/st/features/fedscience.shtml" >Star
Trek-related — and we hope it will bring us one step closer to
making IM and Internet voice calling as ubiquitous as email.
Tags: , google, Jazayeri, manager, Mike, Posted, product, TalkWeve
Posted by Mike Jazayeri, Product
Manager, Google Talk
Thirteen more, to be exact. Google Talk has just added some new
language interfaces: UK English, French, Italian, German, Spanish,
simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean,
Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, and Turkish.
Check it out and talk
amongst yourselves…
Tags: , google, Jazayeri, manager, Mike, Posted, product, TalkThirteen
Posted by Mike Jazayeri, Google Talk
Product Manager
The rainy season and short days are back in full swing in the
Pacific Northwest and the Google Talk team, based here in Kirkland,
Washington, has been making the best use of all this time indoors.
Thanks to their hard work, there are a lot of exciting things in
store for Google Talk in
the coming months, and we thought the best way to tell you about
them was to create a
blog (powered by Blogger,
of course!). We'll keep you posted on new features, happenings
in the community, and progress toward our goal of
href="http://www.google.com/talk/developer.html" >enabling customer
choice in Internet communications through open standards and
interoperability. From time to time we might even tell you about
some of our favorite Seattle hangouts and traditions, too.
Tags: , google, Jazayeri, ManagerThe, Mike, Posted, product, talk