Google Talk Updates, AOL Interop

The upgrades that Google have been testing to their IM/VOIP client, Google Talk, officially launched today. They include easy file transfer, voicemail and “music status”, which tells your friends what you are listening to. Most of these features require actual use of the Google Talk client (v. access via Jabber), which is only available for Windows machines.

I’m not going to say this is boring stuff (I’ll let Ben Metcalfe do that for me), and I’m not even going to begin to discuss the pitiful user numbers that Google has for their IM service. Instead, I’ll mention something interesting I saw in CNET’s writeup on this. Mike Jazayeri, Google Talk’s product manager, told CNET that Google and AOL will make their chat services interoperable in the future, to counter the Yahoo-Microsoft parallel partnership. This was ll part of the $1 billion investment deal Google did with AOL last year, but I had forgotten all about it.