Google Talk has just been upgraded to add file transfer, music trends, voicemail and buddy icons – basically it is catching up with a number of the other instant messaging offerings. They also have a “chat theme” feature which allows you to customise how the chat window displays the chat (with or without buddy icon, with or without dividers or chat bubbles, etc.). It is not quite as simple as it was when it was launched, but the interface is still clean and tidy. The upgrade was really neat, it didn’t force me to download a new binary, I just clicked Check for Updates Now on the popup menu, and it upgraded itself silently.
I admit that I haven’t used Talk much, but I’ll try to log on to it more often and give it a try. There’s a Google Talk Blog which you can follow if you are interested – in fact it turns out that there are blogs for pretty much all of the Google offerings..
In other IM news, I’m now running one of the release candidates of IBM Sametime 7.5 on my work laptop, and it is really good 🙂 Not long to wait before the release, now…
Update: Sametime 7.5 is available early – great news! More here and here. The full release is next week.
