Google Talk
Google Talk is probably one of the latest chat clients on the block. Needless to say, it has some really cool features similar to other products offered by its parent company.
To use all the features of Google Talk, you will need to have a Gmail account. Those without Gmail will not be able to use all the features, but they will still be able to enjoy plenty of Google Talk’s features regardless of who they use for e-mail.
Once you have added friends to your list, to chat with them you just have to click on their names and start chatting. Google Talk has a feature to collapse, stack and rearrange multiple chat windows which makes it easy to chat with more than one person at a time.
You are instantly notified when someone is trying to send you a message. Of course for that you will need to have Google Talk running in the background and displayed in your system tray. These notifications appear even when the chat window is hiding. Offline messages can only be sent to friends who have a Gmail account.
One-to-one or group voice and video chat is free, as long as all parties have Google Talk enabled and the voice plug-in installed. There is also an option for voice mail which allows you to send and receive audio messages of up to 10 minutes. These messages can be downloaded from the recipient’s e-mail account. Additionally, Gmail users can play voice mails right from the e-mail.
You can send Word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, movie files, and so on. Google has even added a timer for estimated download times for larger files. When file transfers are in progress, you will still be able to continue chatting no matter how big the file is.
Google Talk supports music players like Windows Media Player, Winamp, iTunes, Yahoo Music Engine, which allows you to show friends what songs you’re currently listening to.
Virtually anyone can use the web-based Google Talk Gadget, including Mac users. For Mac useres, however, offline messages, voice mail and file transfers are disabled.
There are a lot of exclusive features on Google Talk. For example, if you copy a YouTube URL and post it in the Google Talk Gadget it will automatically embed the video instead of displaying the text link.
Google Talk has all the bells and whistles one would expect in a chat client. Smileys emoticons, themes, and the like are all there. The only quibble is that it doesn’t support multiple fonts, but if that’s the worst thing about, then Google has a winner.
