2006-02-11
nice move google
They might have a bunch of propellor heads churning out the cool infrastructure, but it seems google has hired some excellent marketing/business development people as well.
By leverging people's gmail's accounts with a silly web chat interface, and releasing it in dribbles, they have created a huge demand to check out this 'cool' new application.
I've already had a couple of people 'trial' it with me by sending silly messages like 'test' or 'ping', and I can see with my chat client that most of them just leave it up now that they have it, and it seems like if a person has me in their address book I can see if they are online or not, further increasing the chance I'll use it (instead of the other networks)
While I said in a "previous post":http://feh.holsman.net/articles/2005/08/24/what-the-world-needs I said I wasn't going to use it until it has interoperability.. I was forced to use by a lecturer who only gave out his 'gtalk' IM.
and sadly, I am still not sure what the advantage of 'owning' a IM network is.. I use "adium":http://adium.sf.net and to me all networks look the same. (the only network adium can't see is skype)
the only 'cool' thing is that it uses's jabber's open protocol, so I can start writing notification applications using jabber instead of email.