Last week, on Tuesday, I was as giddy as a fat kid on Thanksgiving, patiently, yet eagerly awaiting the arrival of a mystery IM client from Google. Wednesday morning, I was presented with Google Talk. What is it? Well, it seems to be a jabber client with a slick UI and PC-to-PC talk capability. But thats it. I was hoping for a lot more. I will cut this down to the basic good and bad: The Good: -Super Simple User Interface That looks and functions great -Great quality sound for calls with little to no setup -Uses an IM standard (Jabber), so you can access it with other clients (gaim, trillian, ichat, etc) The Bad: -It's not a multi-protocol client -Doesn't do anything I couldn't already do before. (aim, msn, yahoo all have "talk" functionality) -Didn't revolutionize IM. (After GMail, I have come to expect so much out of Google, but I'm probably setting my standards too high) So thats it. I hope and pray that there is a lot in store for Google Talk that we will see in the future, but for right now. I'll keep it installed and running for novelty's sake. The second part of my post was going to be about Google branding. I am getting a little annoyed that no two Google products look alike. Between Gmail, Picasa, Google Talk, Google Personalized Home Page, Google Earth, Blogger, Google Maps, and the desktop aspects of Google Desktop, you would think at least 2 of them might look similar, but they don't. the close [X] buttons, the expanded/collapsed nodes, the options buttons, the headers, the logos, nothing looks similar. You would hope such a big company would at least strive for some sort of uniformness in their product portfolio. I also understand that most of these products were purchased by Google after they were developed by another company, but come on, at least have some consistency.
 
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