Gmail Voice Chat & Video Rocks

Google has pulled off yet another spectacular with web applications... Yahoo have been trying to do this for sometime now, Ebay wanted to do this with Skype after their buy... but it can be said Google has reached their first with quality voice chat and video chat from a web app directly.

To use voice and video chat from Gmail, you have to install a browser addon called GoogleVoiceAndVideo (the size is pretty large: 447KB) and this enables Voice and Video chat from within Gmail, just like the current Instant Messaging (IM) window within Gmail. While you are checking your emails, you can chat from anywhere in the world. You don't need to have that client application installed.

Gmail had text chatting in the web app for a year or so and this helped gain some market share in the IM world. Google Talk and Gmail chat are still long way behind MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messengers usage, but continuous improvements like this may help Google gain some market share in the IM market...

The Voice Chat and Video Chat uses a proprietary technology called "Vidyo technology"... The quality is pretty good and is nearly same as the GTalk desktop application. Obviously like Gmail's chat, there are some bugs in Voice chat as well and sometimes the connection doesn't happen the first time. But most times the voice was clear and crisp. For a first day after launch the service was pretty good.

I often use Skype for Voice and video chat. Skype has got a Linux client and its voice is one of the best in terms of quality. Gmail's voice doesn't work with Linux. Both Skype and Gmail's voice does not use Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which I would have liked to see, to allow inter-interoperability between different VoIP providers. Nevertheless, bringing it to the browser is a new improvement that will bring ease-of-use to the users.

Yahoo Messenger For Vista: Download Preview

When Yahoo Messenger 9 was released last month, I was a little disappointed. I had seen the previous videos about the special yahoo messenger for vista. Since another "normal" version of Yahoo Messenger was released before the Vista one, I thought Yahoo has forgotten about the Vista-special version of its messenger. But Yahoo today released a preview version of its Yahoo Messenger for Vista.

The Yahoo Messenger for Vista does not have all the features that are part of the normal yahoo messenger since its only a preview. The highly anticipated voice chat, video sharing and file sharing (using Microsoft's Silverlight) seems to be missing from this version, which was demo'd at the CES. Also, its taken Yahoo way too long to release even this half-baked version.

The Yahoo Messenger for Vista is actually meant to showcase the bling-bling using the Vista specific graphic capabilities as well as other Vista components like Sidebar. A lot of people have been complaining about the slow performance of his version. Long Zheng says that Vista SP1 might improve the performance of the WPF that this version uses.

You can read more about it at the Yahoo Messenger Blog.

Gmail's GTalk Has Emoticons ??

Just heard from Tech-Buzz, that the GTalk interface built inside Gmail has got Emoticons and Group Chat. There's a nice looking screenshot with the post. The emoticons have existed in GTalk, but it's been only Character-oriented and didn't have the icons.

This was a much needed addition to GTalk since every other popular IM has got emoticons with icons bulit into it. The new group chat is also interesting since IM also involves some group discussion at times. But like Thilak from tech-buzz mentions, only the web-interface gets the emoticons and not the GTalk client. I somehow like the GTalk thats built into the Gmail's interface and find it a very nifty IM that needs no installation. It's part of the Google web world, where the desktop is seconday and web-apps is Google's first child. So, I was excited to use the emoticons in the web-interface, but was sad that my account didn't have the emoticons. :(

Hope I get the emoticon icons in a few days and can share my facial expressions in the dull world of text IM!! I'm sure the GTalk client will get this feature pretty soon.