January 9th, 2006 by Jake
Up until this point, Google Talk users have had to stick with a basic Jabber client if they wanted to opt out of using the Google Talk client. Enter Gtalkr, a web/flash-based Google Talk Client. It has all the features you’d expect from a Google Talk client, including the ability to view message previews of conversations in your Inbox, customize your own RSS Feeds, send out invitations, and search the Web (via Google, of course.) But, no, they need to add something more that will make people want to use this instead of their trusty Google Talk Clients, so there are a few minor differences that differ the two cleints.
The Flash client allows you to set yourself not only to “Available” or “Busy”, but “Away” as well, which in the classic Google Talk client is reserved for people who have gone Idle (the Orange blip). Another new, nifty feature is the ability to choose and upload your own avatar or Buddy Icon. What’s nice about this is that there’s no filesize limit on the avatars. I just uploaded a 1276×842, 187KB JPEG, and it didn’t complain, it just quietly went to work uploading, and when it was done, it simply resized it to fit the little 50×50 window above my buddy list. Another less important, but different feature nonetheless, is the fact that it tells your buddy when you’ve closed the window. Now, some people don’t like this concept, they see it as an invasion of privacy because it’s your right to close whatever window you want, and your friends shouldn’t be messaged when you do. Yet another feature I’ve just discovered (I’m messing around with it as I write this) is that it saves all of your conversations in a “Chat Inbox”, basicalyl the same thing as logging all of your conversations. I don’t know the extent to which it logs, but it seems to sort it by date, and per-window, meaning if I said “Hi” to you, closed the window, and you responded back saying “Hey”, it would mark it as two separate logs.
Gtalkr also sports a nifty little homepage which doubles as your workspace (the area behind your chat windows). It allows you to customize, kind of in a Windows Live Homepage kind of way, where it allows you to drag-and-drop your “windows” with your feeds and news headlines around the page. They even set you up with a default news feed from Digg.com. Nifty, but none of those homepages with feeds, news, weather, etc. have really appealed to me yet.
A really smart idea, I’m sure this will grow to become the next “AIM Express” of its type. I’ll definately use it when I’m on-the-go, but when I’m at home, I’ll stick with my trusty Google Talk client, thank you very much.
