IM & chat have been frustrating for me.
There are just too many (incompatible) systems, and it seems that you need them all if you’re to stay in-touch with your contacts… Some people use MSN, others use Yahoo, and still others use AIM…
My computer would be out of memory if I ran them all.
And I didn’t even mention Google Talk (my personal favorite).
So, for years, I’ve been on a quest to find “the ultimate” universal IM client program… One that would let me chat with everyone.
When a business looks at moving its IT functions “into the cloud,” there are some obvious cost savings (no more servers to maintain, no more expensive software to license, and so forth), but I still run into people who wonder if their operations will be as reliable as the proprietary systems they’re giving-up.
Over at the Official Google Blog, they explain just how fanatical they are about uptime, pointing-out, “We measure every server request for every user, every moment of every day. Any millisecond delay is logged.”
And after having moved more than a million businesses off of expensive, in-house servers, and onto the cloud, that attention to detail has paid-off, with greater than 99.9% reliability.
How does that compare with the old, proprietary technologies?
Over the years, I’ve used all of the commercial web conferencing systems… WebEx, MeetMeNow, and the plethora of others that have come and gone.
Online conferencing is a great thing if you want to make a presentation without having to travel. The people watching can be in multiple locations around the globe, and most of the services offer a combination of screen sharing, chat, video, and voice.
The problem is, they’ve all been pretty expensive for a small company.
That’s why I was especially excited to discover DimDim.
Google announced yesterday that they’ve added video and audio chat to the Google Talk application.
It’s actually a pretty nifty addition to Google Talk (which is built-into GMail), allowing you to see (and speak with) clients, co-workers, and others using the Google Talk IM protocol.
Enabling video and audio chat requires that you install a very small plugin, which will add the capability to your browser.
However, Google doesn’t make it easy to find that plugin (at the time of this writing, the “How to guide” only mentions the need to download and install the plugin, but doesn’t tell you where to find it.
After a little digging-around, I found it here.
Currently, the plugin (and thus, the capability to video chat) is only available for Windows.