An exclusive gaming industry community targeted
to, and designed for Professionals, Businesses
and Students in the sectors and industries
of Gaming, New Media and the Web, all closely
related with it's Business and Industry.
A Rich content driven service including articles,
contributed discussion, news, reviews, networking, downloads,
and debate.
We strive to cater for cultural influencers,
technology decision makers, early adopters and business leaders in the gaming industry.
A medium to share your or contribute your ideas,
experiences, questions and point of view or network
with other colleagues here at iVirtua Community.
You can now talk to AIM contacts inside of Gmail- just open the drop down menu in the quick contacts list and select“Sign in to AIM.†The buddy list appears - personally I’d also go toOptions in the bottom left and choose “Show all contacts.†(You canpick your buddy list size too - I like medium.)
In reality, I don’t really use Gmail too often; I prefer MozillaThunderbird. What this recent integration may suggest, however, ispretty grand. It may be a hint that Google is trying to get multiplenetworks integrated into its chat.
As of now, I’m using Pidgin (hey, itsfree and it works) to link my AIM and gTalk accounts. It works fine andhas some nice features, but it lacks some more vital functions. Filesharing works fine with AIM, but when I try to share files with gTalkcontacts the sharing never goes through. (I haven’t been able to testit with MSN or Yahoo!) Pidgin lacks voice and video features as well.(gTalk, on the other hand, has a very nice calling feature that Isorely miss.)
Trillian makes me pay for gTalk.
And along comes Google. I’m hoping (and thinking…and begging) thatthe Google Talk desktop client will eventually support AIM as well. Itwould be very, very nice to be able to use gTalk for Google, AIM, andother networks all at once. I’m sure Google would be able to pull itoff with flair. It would most definitely increase the number of users -the only thing stopping me from using gTalk is the fact that I’d haveto have two programs running for chat (AIM/Pidgin and gTalk). They’vealready managed to integrate AIM into Gmail…how hard would it be tobring it to the desktop?
As more evidence, Google’s blog concludes with: “P.S. If you own alarge IM network and would like to work with us, have your peoplecontact our people.†I’m not sure what that means exactly, but it ringsof “AIM is only the beginning.â€
My only doubt right now is about how that would work out in thepolitics of the Internet…would Yahoo!, and Microsoft ever have theirpeople call Google’s people? AOL, I can understand. They’re losingalready. But Microsoft seems to believe itself to be a competitor ofGoogle (even though Microsoft makes software); I wonder what would happen there.
Google supporting multiple networks in one client wouldn’t surpriseme. It’s just another reminder that Google is dominating the Internet.