I'm painfully aware, though, that whatever laughs I'm having at the expense of those folks are going to come back at me in spades. The social engineering behind worms and viruses is getting smarter, and it's only a matter of time before something slips past my defences. I'll click on something I shouldn't; and that will be that.

More Noise to Signal

Google Talk is probably one of the few messaging clients that doesn't have a way for you to interact with other Google Talk users unless you know their email address. GTalk Profile provides the perfect solution to this problem. Using Google Maps, GTalk Profile allows users to plot where they are on a map and also find other users around the world. Simply type your city and state into the search box and GTalk Profile will provide you with a list of users near you along with a description of each user. Clicking on a name takes you to a profile page where you'll find a longer description, photos, interests, location, and the option to request a user's Google Talk information.

Sign Up for GTalk Profile

Currently the most active countries seem to be Europe, Africa and South America. The United States is the least active country on GTalk Profile. Hopefully that will change soon. GTalk Profile is a great way to expand your Google contacts, though we'd be careful about accepting any and every request on this service.

Recently Yahoo and Google announced a partnership for advertising. Yahoo will run advertisements provided by Google alongside the companies own advertisements. However, what was overlooked was the statement that both companies "agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant-messaging services, bringing easier and broader communication to users".

The Problem

Companies like Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft try to do things that are beneficial for their entire community and not just for small portions of it. Stephan Shankland noted that:

"AOL said in a statement, in effect, that I am indeed an anomaly. "We have no evidence that interoperating with other consumer IM services is of great interest to AIM users," the company said."

This may come as a huge "ouch!" to early adopters, social media fanatics, and generally those that network online 24/7. Such users only represent a small portion of these immense networks. While they may be the users that push the envelope and can help the tools that these companies produce become better and more productive, AOL understands that the average users probably won't care.

In acknowledging this, interoperability becomes more of a distant dream than a reality. In layman's terms, it seems interoperability won't happen unless there's a major push from the majority of users or it's somehow beneficial financially for any of the parties involved. This may be a sad conclusion for some.

What it Could Mean

If Yahoo and Google do open up their respective clients to one another, this will be a very beneficial move to both parties because they have already integrated other platforms: Yahoo with Live Messenger and Google with AIM. Also, If it does happen users will at least have the option to pick between the two and get the best of the majority of these networks. If you have the majority of your contacts on Yahoo and Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger would be the best platform for you with the added benefit of Google Talk interoperability. If you have more contacts on Google and AIM, then Google Talk would be the better choice with the benefit of integrating your Yahoo contacts too.

However, is this really enough? I don't think it'll keep users from using third party clients that enable interoperability between all of these networks and more. Digsby is poised to take a serious amount from the market share of the standard clients because of its interoperability not only with IM clients, but also because of the integrated social networks and even email. It makes me wonder if maybe Digsby is poised to be the "Firefox" of instant messaging if the dominating players aren't careful. What do you think?

See also: Poll: Which Instant Messaging Client(s) Do You Use?

Hello, which was part of Google's 2004 acquisition of Picasa, seems to have been neglected in recent years. According to Compete, Hello's traffic has fallen by over 50% year-over-year, and Wikipedia says that Hello shut down its "Bloggerbot IM" service in favor of Picasa's "Blog This" function in 2006.

The Hello team encourages users to use Picasa, Picasa Web Albums, and Google Talk, and it seems likely that redundancy is what killed Hello. Google Talk already has file sharing and Picasa albums are viewable within the chat client (though Google Talk doesn't encrypt files and chats the way Hello did). Could we see tighter integration between Picasa and Google Talk now that Hello is out of the picture? And more importantly, what will Google do with such a cool domain?