But with the technology Google has licensed from SRI, image stabilization will no longer be a concern ... at least on Android. Google is implementing the SRI tech in its Google Talk application, to deliver better video on Android 3.0+ devices. And that may be only the beginning of Google's computer vision plans.

Image stabilization technology is over 20 years old, with initial applications built for defense use by DARPA. The technology was crucial to autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles and robotics. Someone driving a tank, for example, would get nauseous in 2 minutes if it weren't for stabilization technologies, Winarsky says.

But these days, the tech has made its way into more benign, consumer-facing efforts, like Google Talk, apparently. Here, the video chatting application captures the video from a device's front-facing camera and compresses the data before transmission. In the compression algorithms, the amount of bandwidth used increases with the amount of motion in a scene.

By stabilizing the video, SRI's software allows the compression to take up fewer bits. Simply put, it's more efficient. It takes less work and fewer resources.

What Could Google Do, Post-Video Stabilization?

Although SRI can't talk for Google or about its future plans in this area, saying only that it "fully hopes to work beyond this app with Google," Winarsky was happy to talk in more general terms about where computer vision technologies are headed.

Once you have the stabilization down, he says, you can then work on things like tracking objects that appear in the frame, tracking the motion of objects and recognizing those objects. Head tracking, for example, was demonstrated at this year's Google I/O where the stabilization technology was used in conjunction with a face-tracking API (application programming interface) that will arrive in a future version of Google's mobile operating system Android.

Put it all together - stabilization, image tracking and image recognition - and you have "augmented reality" (AR), a term that describes technology that lets your device "see" the world in front of its camera lens and then act on that data in some way.

Google, of course, is already experimenting with AR to some extent through its "Google Goggles" application which lets you use pictures to search the Web. Google Goggles can currently identify things like landmarks, books, art, wine and logos, but has recently started recognizing text, too, in order to perform on-the-fly translations between languages.

Facial Recognition in Video?

There are other things that stabilization can help to enable, says Winarsky. For example, facial recognition. Until an image is stabilized, such a thing would not be possible on video. After stabilization though, the same type of algorithms that currently work on still images could be applied to moving video.

Google already uses facial recognition in its online photo-sharing service Picasa (soon to be rebranded as "Google Photos"), so it's not a big leap to assume that Google could introduce something like that to its video applications and services someday. Facial recognition in Google Talk? YouTube? Google Goggles? Who knows?

Case in point: earlier this year, Google denied that it has a facial recognition app in development, after CNN published a report to the contrary, including an on-record statement from a Google employee confirming its existence.  And Google recently rolled out a smart update to search that allows you to search for things using only an image. And guess what? It works for images of people, too.

So why not make people chatting with you on video, seen through your camera lens or those appearing in online videos "Googleable" objects? There's only one reason not to: it's a little creepy. But creepy/awesome is the line Google likes to toe. For the company, it's not a matter of if something is possible - it's only a matter of when is the right time to release it.

Stabilization, on its own, may seem like minor news, but it's an important first step towards a future where the world itself, and all the people in it, are things you can Google just by looking at them.

Chat in Gmail already features video and voice chat, but the file transfer feature is currently still missing. It always seemed rather strange to us that some of Google's instant messaging services like the Google Talk desktop client already had this capability. Now, there isn't even feature parity among the web-based version of Google Talk anymore. Hopefully Google will soon fulfill its promise and bring this feature to Gmail as well.

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?