#Gtalk

I just read this post about the deal that eBay and Google signed which will also allow Google Talk and Skype to interoperate and possibly be able to communicate even via chats. It them folloed by an enlightened moment (Ka ching!) where I thought of an idea that Google can use to deepen Google Talk`s penetration in the corporate environment. Google Talk is based on the solid and open standards of XMPP (Jabber). [Read More]

A while back Google added a feature to Gmail so that you can see which of your friends is online and chat with them. While this might look cool there is another side to this story, people can actually see when you are reading your Emails on your Gmail account. I, for example, use GAIM as my main IM client and since Google Talk (GTalk) uses Jabber as its underlying protocol, it means that every Jabber supported client can connect to GTalk. [Read More]

Continuing my current fixation about Jabber and Jabber related stuff (it all started with this post about how Google is openning up Google Talk to talk with other Jabber based servers), there is a good article up on O’Relly’s OnLamp.com about the pros and cons of a Company-Wide Instant Messaging solutions as well as how to setup Jabberd 2.x to do just that. It’s really worth the read for people that are trying to figure out how to utilize an IM solution in their company while still retaining a high degree of security. [Read More]

A while back I posted a request/hope that Google Talk will open up to AOL using one of the Jabber bridges. I also secretly hoped (meaning, I forgot to blog about it) that since Google Talk uses Jabber, they will open up its federation abilities and enable everying Google Talk user to communicate with any other Jabber user (providing that that user supports the necessary XMPP spec that Google Talk uses, which I still don’t know if it is one of the common ones, but I’ll check that up). [Read More]

As my good friend Dudu pointed out (and I forgot to tell you), Google Talk’s log abilities are very limited. It only saves the last 20 lines of chat (and only if the window was closed properly, otherwise it will NOT save the log). Since Google Talk currently lack any normal API (heck, its just one executable file ;-) ), I thought about writing a small up that would listen to file changes in the log directory, parse them and accumelate them in one file per converstaion with a person (similar to what the log is doing now). [Read More]

After discovering the Google Talk Chat Log format and seeing that its not human readable, I’ve decided to write a log viewer so I can check out and read my logs whenever I want to.

You can download the Google Talk Chat Log Viewer v0.1 from here .

I’ve also written there the Google Talk Chat Log format if anyone else is interested.

Enjoy!

Google Talk stored all of your custom messages that you have entered in a file in your user profile directory. The file is located at “%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Talk\status” Inside you will find a file named in the format [userid]-history.txt. So if your Gmail account is John.Dow@gmail.com the filename will be john.dow_gmail.com-history.txt (besides, there is usually only one file there anyway ;-) ). The file format is very easy. It start with a first line which has the character “1” in it. [Read More]

If you every wondered how to disable Google Talk’s auto update feature, I found an easy way of doing this which, at least for now, seems to work. NOTE: Be sure to backup the registry entries before using the registry’s Export feature when standing on the Google Talk AutoUpdate key. Close Google Talk Open the registry (using regedit.exe) Go to My Machine\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Talk\Autoupdate Change the value of UpdateURL to something in valid (or empty) Start Google Talk That’s it. [Read More]

It seems that there are more than a few people (well, at least 2) that have some other thoughts about Google. I must admit that at first I was also inside the Google Talk frenzy, submersed in all the hype, but after reading Nuggest’s post and Drunken Batman’s post I started to ponder a bit about their thoughts and I must say that have some really good points. Although Google Talk is still in v1. [Read More]

I just installed Google Talk (talk.google.com). Its REALLY cool. It’s a basic IM and its in Beta but the Voice has a really good quality. I really liked the fact that they use an open standard, the Jabber/XMPP (www.xmpp.org) which is always good. This means that you can use any Jabber/XMPP supported client like iChat (for MacOS), GAIM (For Windows and Linux), etc. Read their developer manifesto here, to see that they mean business and I do hope that they will use the built-in federation ability of the Jabber/XMPP protocol to federate messages to other IMs such as Yahoo, AIM/ICQ and MSN. [Read More]