I Like Walks On The Beach With Dolphins And Sharks

Addendum Thoughts on GTalk Upgrade (File-Sharing mostly)

I’m scared.

It’s not that Google is the first to gather information on people. I mean, check out the Bible. It’s got plenty of info on the human race. Personal stuff. Imagine being remembered for being so fat that your belly sucked in an entire sword. And that book is plenty old.

But our public conscience, globally, is waking up to just what kind of power the gathering of such personal information means. Google have access to our search thoughts. Which, from what we summise, are pretty good at determining our personal habits etc etc.

What then with the File-Sharing functionality.

It’s another layer of information gathering. They are providing, free of charge, a massive file sharing peer to peer network. From what I’ve read, the hardware behind the scenes is top notch. It’s Google afterall. They do things well.

But being able to share files means people will be dragging and dropping away little bits of who we are. What kind of music we listen to. What pictures we like looking at. Our writing style.

Already they have access to our work conversations. Most of us don’t turn off the ability for gtalk to save a record of the conversation in gmail. This is a great tool for us, the User. But it’s also a record. A record held by someone other than my filing cabinet in the dusty back room of the office.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not a panic merchant conspiracy theorist. But the mind easily follows these thoughts. It’s very possible that one day a gold-finger type guy is going to buy out Google and start laughing very high and loud. But then again, that probably won’t happen. Apes would rule the world first. Hmmmm.

Anyway, that’s my two cents prompted by use of the file-sharing in the latest GTalk upgrade.

Talking It G-Style

GTalk (Google Talk) has had an upgrade.

What do you get?

Well, depends how into the whole im thing.

1. File Sharing .. you get to transfer files to your peeps. Not bad at all, depending on your use of GTalk. In my bizo i can’t see much of a use, but you never know.

gtalkupgrade_001

2. Voice Mail .. now this is interesting. I like the idea a lot, in a gimicky kind of way. It’s got potential for some funny stunts, but I can’t see it increasing our productivity in development :) heh heh.

gtalkupgrade_002

3. Music Trends .. Hmmm. Just a specific tie into the sig line. You can get it to make your sig into the song your currently listening too. Not bad.

gtalkupgrade_003

Under the hood there have been some subtle improvements.

  • When talking with someone, in the base window, a voice bubble icon appears, instead of the (red, green, orange) circlegtalkupgrade_004
  • Enhancements to the Sig line interface, not sure, but looks like a visual tightening of the interfacegtalkupgrade_005
  • when hovering over contacts in the base window, the window that pops up allows you access to functionality like sending files (not sure if this is brand new, might have been around for a while, but i just really looked at itgtalkupgrade_006

So Google has kicked it up another notch, bam. Seriously, they are doing good with this ..

My only concern is that gtalk will become overly crowded (interface-wise) like all the other im clients. Never let it be so!

Cheers,

GoogleSpeek

Well, first cab off the ranks. Google have released their Instant Messenger (ish) software. Google Talk is pretty cool. Adam and I have gotten it going today. It’s got a few cool features. You need a gmail account.

It’s crazy the amount of stuff Google is getting into. Crazy.