Google Talk, Lab Edition – More Disappointment, Less To Cheer About!

Google Talk, Lab Edition

(Image Source: Google Talk)

Google Talk, Lab Edition is an experimental release from Google that brings feature of Google Talk online gadget into Google Talk desktop client.

The overall list of features is quite surprising. A number of prominent features are missing at the cost of not so important feature!

Here is the list of features this Lab Edition comes with…

  • Group chat, tabbed chatting (from online gadget)
  • Receiving notification from Gmail, Orkut and Google Calendar (from desktop client)
  • Option to set Gmail as default mail client,ability to launch Gmail, orkut, google calendar from system tray (Newly Added)
  • Snooze option – disable notification for one hour. Better than disabling all notifications in present desktop client.

Here is the list of missing features…

  • file transfer
  • voice chat
  • invisible status option as in Gmail Chat (read more…)
  • option to hide offline friends from list
  • option to change display picture

Forget invisible status option as we can use gAlwaysIdle for that, but ability to hide offline friends is must have, as with ~3000 contact in my Gmail list, finding online buddies is a though job!

What caught my eyes is simple settings pane. Of course it need to be made a little complex to incorporate missing features in next release…

Google Talk, Lab Edition - Settings

Overall its little slow and missing feature list is a big disappointment! 🙁

Anyway if you want to give it a try its here.

Link: Google Talk, Lab Edition (via Tech-Buzz)

Related: Adding Always Idle Status option in Google Talk

14 Comments

Gaurav April 9, 2008

Rightly said rahul.. what I think that this is just a basic tryout version and possibly google people are trying to add a couple f features into next version of gtalk.. they have just made a desktop client out of the gtalk widget… hope they make next version of Gtalk better… compared to yahoo and MSN ,gtalk still lacks a lot of features…

Pratik April 10, 2008

i personally installed lab edition…its really bad especially when the developer is Google Inc

Rahul Bansal April 10, 2008

@Gaurav
You are right buddy. Atleast features related to privacy & security should have implemented long time back. I feel every person have right to remain invisible. Not only Google Talk but other Google services like orkut also failed to deal with privacy issues gracefully.
The only thing I like in Google Talk is chat history feature! 🙂

@Pratik
Sure, the Google factor is biggest reason for disappointment.
We can’t expect something this bad from Google!

Thilak April 11, 2008

Ouch, I found your trackback caught by Akismet as spam. Who is your host?

Rahul Bansal April 11, 2008

@Thilak
Thanks for bringing it to notice! 🙂
I use shared hosting on dreamhost. Many user have same(shared) IP address here.
I guess someone is spamming here and akismet may be using IP addresses for filtering… 🙁

Thilak April 11, 2008

@Rahul
Yeah, that looks like the case case because other blogs hosted on Dreamhost are also being caught as spam. I marked you as ham, but you need to ask other blog owners to do the same as well. That why, Akismet will learn and whitelist you.

Rahul Bansal April 11, 2008

@Thilak
I sent an email regarding this to dreamhost. Next things I want to confirm if akismet uses IP addresses for filtering.
Actually dreamhost have so many users so iI will rather go for unique IP option. It will cost me $4/month but. 🙁

Thilak April 11, 2008

@Rahul:
My guess is that Akismet takes IP into account while determining whether a comment is a spam or ham. Each sever has a unique IP, looks like your neighbor is a spammer.

Rahul Bansal April 12, 2008

@Thilak
Ya. It seems to me. Bad neighborhood is always a problem… 🙁
I got a reply from dreamhost team. Its nice and in detail but still left me in confused state.
Just for info, pasting it here…

Hi Rahul,

I hate spam as much as you do – and Akismet is great for fighting spam.
They won’t give up their secret sauce as far as what they weigh tho, so I can’t confirm from anyone there if they’re blocking IPs or not. I have several blogs here. All of them run Akismet and they’ve caught some of the trackbacks from my other blogs as spam in the few years that I’ve hosted here. Marking the messages as “not spam” actually tells Akismet that you’re okay and enough “not spam” flags actually make things weigh heavily in your favor when it is ranking the content coming from you.

From what I can see, nobody is abusing your shared hosting plan. Or if they are, I’m not seeing anything out of the ordinary. If you want to try using a unique IP address, you are more than welcome to. I suggest buying it on a month-to-month basis for now and if that doesn’t fix things you’re only out $3.95 USD. Actually, if you’d like I’d be happy to credit you for a month of Unique IP service just so you can try it out and see if that stops Akismet from flagging you.

Just let me know how you plan on going about things and I’ll make sure you get the help that you deserve, alright?

Thanks!

Jason

Abhishek December 13, 2008

new version is there of lab edt. but still disappointing, galwayshide doesn’t work there, but idle is there

Rahul Bansal December 16, 2008

@Abhishek
Google Talk Lab Edition is really a big disappointment. I wonder why Google spend more time on improving Gmail chat version and not desktop Google Talk clients. 🙁

Theodore October 15, 2009

Apart from the function to log as “invisible” (even this feature doesn’t work well as it shows you as “available” for a moment when logging in, before goes invisible), this version is a real disaster! I am spending the day today, for the second time as offline and no more able to get online… After leaving Labs online, today, I tried to log in from my office with plain “Google Talk” client. What happened is that I completely lost my contact list! Nothing worked till now. I tried switching off the “labs” function from within gmail web page, switching back to “older version” and then back to current, I uninstalled the labs edition and reinstalled Google Talk. Nothing worked…

prasad December 15, 2009

i hv dis-pointed , in lastest version of lab edition gtalk, the voice chat as nt present ed… compare to old edition , lab edition is vry vry bad…..