Scott Yang's Playground

On Google’s official blog, they are celebrating the birthday of Google Talk.

Wait a minute. Google What? Or am I the only one who could not remember that promising Jabber/XMPP-powered Windows-based chat client?

Google Talk has actually had a lot of improvement since its launch one year ago. File sharing. Integration with Gmail, etc. They have also been “federated” with many other Jabber servers. The latest version is quite a nice and clean app without feature bloat like almost every other IM clients.

However, the problem is, where are the users? None of my contacts uses Google Talk.

I wrote about Google Talk exactly one year ago. I was excited, and I concluded “Oh yeah. Time to dump Skype :)”. 12 months later, I am still using Skype because of its video capability, despite proprietary P2P protocol. I still can’t call SIP numbers, nor land-line numbers from Google Talk. I have no one to talk to on Google Talk — no wonder it has not been fired up last couple of months.

I am still using my home Jabber server to talk to my other IM correspondents on various networks. One observation I had over this year is, my ICQ “buddies” are never on-line, and most of them are using MSN now (aargh!!). The success of an IM network still rests on the size of its user community, no matter how bloat and ads-infested your IM software is.