Google is Talk of the town

Google has belatedly entered the instant messaging (IM) and internet telephony market with the beta test launch of Google Talk

Carly Stevenson, product manager for Zultys and Facetime at Unipalm, said: “It’s another kind of public IM client, with Skype’s [voice over IP ] capabilities. This will not be a commercial product.”

AOL, Yahoo, IBM Lotus’s Sametime, Novell’s Groupwise and Microsoft’s MSN service are all offering commercial IM systems. However, not all of them have linked their IM systems with a service such as Skype.

Bob Tarzey, services director at Quocirca, said: “Skype has not yet cornered the internet telephony market.”

However, he warned that Google could lose its focus.

“People are confused about what Yahoo is, because it has launched so many products,” he claimed.

Google Talk users can only talk to others that use Jabber’s IM protocol or XMPP, but the company intends to support as many IM protocols as possible, allowing users of different systems to communicate.