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August 24, 2005
Google's VOIP Play
Posted by Dana Blankenhorn
NOTE: Many of the claims made in the item below have been questioned by Russell Shaw. See the full story here.
It's ironic, but my first invitation to use Google Talk came from Pakistan. From Karachi, actually.
Specifically it was from a long-time online friend named Tariq Mustafa (known as Tee Emm), who works in the high-tech sector there.
I am really excited on this Google IM thing (and so would be tens of millions of users very soon). I think I was ahead of you just because of the time-zone difference. Anyway, here is the summary I wanted to share with you of the excitement.
Why the excitement? IM has been around for ages.
The excitement is because this isn't really IM. Or it's not just IM. It's VOIP, integrated from the start with IM.
What this does is absolutely kill international long distance in a way Skype only dreamt of. I'm actually a naive user, but I was able to download, and load, a VOIP client (with IM) in less than a minute.
So can anyone else, anywhere else.
More from Tariq after the break.
a. It's coming from Google - so one can expect a very neat and logical interface of the service if not now, at least in the coming days (its still beta). But Google has always done an excellent job for putting the best interface to everything that they've touched till now.
b. The underlying protocol is Jabber - something that is considered as
the Robinhood of Messenger services. I wrote about this in 2003
c. It is supporting SIP to darling of the newage VoIP services. Despite all the support that SIP enjoys today in the VoIP and the Internet world, we all still needed a giant like Google to put its weight behind SIP to have this protocol formally declared as the VoIP winner protocol. With this happening, I see a major contribution from Google towards putting a lot many things in the VoIP world straight. No wonder if we see a large number of vendors and schools of thoughts following the SIP way that they might have todate avoided. Inline with their 'Do No Evil' principal, Google has avoided a propriatary voip protocol (like Skype) which to me is a cool thing and thumbs up to
google for this.
Make that two thumbs up.
Comments (1)
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Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Jesse Kopelman on August 24, 2005 01:08 PM writes...
If you already use Skype, is there any reason to switch? I find the main driver of which communicator you use is the same as it was back in the early days of IM: which one are the people you want to talk to on. Most people I talk to are on Skype and those who are not, I try and get them to use it. I doubt I will ever use Google Talk unless they have some killer feature (could be superior voice quality) to make it worth my while not only to switch myself but to also persuade everyone I know to switch.
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