The Unheard Word

Google is to introduce their own text and voice messaging system. From CNN:

Citing unnamed sources “familiar with the service,” the Los Angeles Times said that Google’s Instant Messaging program would be called Google Talk and could be launched as early as Wednesday.

What I find interesting about this, is that the market is already chockas full of IM clients. Why one more? Does Google merely want to be ubiquitous — or is their new system an innovative one that will provide benefits for both users and advertisers over and above existing chat systems?

Given users’ antipathy to advertising in their IM clients, I’d wonder about that aspect — although Google’s style is unobtrusive text ads and this would be far less annoying than the flashing, blinking, moving and thus very offensive ads on some of the other systems, though not as good as those that don’t contain any advertising at all. (I love my Mac!)

Yet Google has proved themselves to be a very innovative company and it wouldn’t surprise me if this apparent “catch-up with the competition” scheme will actually have the competition rushing to catch up to Google. I’ll be looking for the new chat client on Wednesday.

Oh hang on, it is Wednesday here. OK then — where is it? 🙂

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 24th, 2005 at 7:10 am and is filed under Society, Web Design, Computers, Technology & the WWW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.