Google Talk talk is “everywhere”:http://www.smashsworld.com/2005/08/im-on-google-talk-right-now.php tonight. Their jabber server is running (I know because like half the blogosphere I was able to connect to talk.google.com via Adium), but I haven’t seen any sign of an official announcement yet. I also tried going to “google.com/talk”:http://google.com/talk to see if I could download the Windows chat client for my XP machine, but as of Tuesday evening at just after 9:20 PM it didn’t work.

Apparently once Google Talk is officially available tomorrow the Windows client will also support Voice over IP which is fairly cool. I haven’t been much of an instant messaging user for close to five years now, which not coincidentally, is about the same length of time that Mary and I have been married. Since Mary was the primary person I IMed with any regularity it shouldn’t be a surprise that I didn’t keep it up.

Interestingly enough, my friend Jesse Jones and I experimented with the venerable unix “talk”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk command line utility quite a bit back when we were in college, but found the technology a bit rough at the time. With laggy network connections, weird overwriting glitches and a tendency to hold two distinct converations at the same time the technology was definitely in its infancy back then, but it was still a pretty fun way to communicate. I can’t speak for Jesse, but it’s interesting to me that I never really embraced Instant Messaging in quite the same way. Maybe with the advent of ICQ and AIM it just got too mainstream for me. Or probably more likely, I just never got in the habit of running my chat client in the background at all times.