Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Instant Messaging, the last bastion of desktop internet applications?

Was doing a bit of geeking last night and noticed nearly everything I was doing was in the browser.  More specifically I was using Facebook chat and gmail chat.  

It's quite sad as I always expected the last few web applications which I'd never use in a browser would be email (which I still don't), RSS Reader (which I now use Google Reader for), and instant messaging.  

I still use Skype, though I wonder if this may soon get overtaken by gmail chat's video feature.

2 comments:

Tim Galea said...

I am totally sold on gmail's interface, and email thread/conversation system. And if you are comfortable with it, its not hard to have gmail host your email and give you all the webmail functionality of gmail.

I used to use desktop email clients, but now prefer gmail browser based.

And check out http://www.google.com/talk/about.html - Skype is going to get a run for its money I think.

Have you used Nimbuzz or any of the other iPhone based IM/VoIP integrators? Runs all the different chat programs within one place. Would be cool if there was something that did that with email, IM chat, and voice. I think that is where Google will take Google Talk, and its where Skype has tried to take their Talk/IM/SMS in v4.0

jklp said...

Ya, I use gTalk on Windows machines, but iChat on Mac. Interesting interface for gTalk, I'm not 100% sure I "get" it but always interesting to see how Google doesn't always stick to the traditional desktop paradigm

I think the only thing gmail had to offer me (originally) was the search, and now I'm on a Mac, Apple's mail.app's search more than makes up for it.

The lack of folders really irks me on gmail. The tagging system doesn't really scale once it gets to a certain size.

As for email from anywhere, my email is all IMAP, with a web interface in case I'm not near an IMAP client (work, home and iPhone more than covers it :) )

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Jerrold is a recently migrated Melbourne based software engineer with roughly 5 years experience developing in Java and the web technology stack (HTML, CSS, DOM, JavaScript, etc). More recently, he's started developing in Python (well, Jython, but close enough) and is unsure if it's flaws outweigh its advantages of having a more sugary syntax. He is currently working at a small South Melbourne based company which specialises in sales incentive management / reporting software, and is being schooled in the finer points of small company operations.