Google Talk Labs edition released, adds group chat and more

Filed under: Utilities, Google, Social Software, Beta

Google Talk Labs edition released, adds group chat and more

by Simon Kerbel Apr 5th 2008

Google Talk Labs edition is a new desktop version of Google Talk that borrows some features from the online Google Talk Gadget, including the addition of Group Chat, emoticons and more.

Google Talk Labs edition also adds new desktop notifications from Google Calendar, Orkut, and Gmail.

Unfortunately, it skimps on a few of the desktop features, and seems more like an intermediate step toward a full-featured desktop Chat application rather than its fulfillment. The most notable missing features are voice calling and file transfers. If you need those, you're better off with the original Google Talk client.

We hope that, in the near future, Google can round up all of its Chat features into one application. Until then, you'll have to pick and choose which features are important to you, and download or use the appropriate Google Talk service.

[via Daily Apps]

Tags: google, google talk, GoogleTalk, IM, labs

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

ryaninc said 4:54PM on 4-05-2008

I love Google Talk and I use it daily, but I think this is the biggest problem with their service. There are so many feature differences between the various versions of the program...it makes it a bit hard to use sometimes. They really need to unify the versions. :-/

larryc said 10:19AM on 4-07-2008

Agree with the prior poster.... How many versions of Google talk (all with different features) do we need? Let's see, there's:
- The standard google talk client (win32)
- The client built into Gmail (Javascript)
- The widget version for iGoogle (Flash)
- The new labs version

How is the typical user (e.g, Grandma) supposed to know which version to use?

Hello? Google Talk program manager? Are you there?

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