12 Nov 2008

Google comes to the video chat party…..forgets to bring nibbles

That’s right, Gmail (which I think is still in beta) has a brand new party outfit – video chat. I remember signing up for Gmail about five years ago mainly because of the huge amount of storage space it offered at the time. For a while, it was my preferred email host until I discovered the wonders of a combined .Mac email, iChat and .Mac page (now MobileMe) and I’ve hardly used. But, will this make me take a second look?

The one big thing that the Gmail version has over its competitors is that it doesn’t require any additional software, running alongside the Gmail web app. Another big plus, it works on both PC and Mac. As with iChat and Skype, users can chat via video and instant message each other at the same time….not sure why you’d do that, but hey.

MyTake – I’ve used the MSN version, Skype and iChat and I have to say, iChat wins hands-down. I haven’t seen this of course, but it’s going to have to do a lot of hard work to beat the boys from Apple. Being late to the party is not good for Team Google, especially as the verb has been taken – “shall we Skype?” Also, not everything has to be a web app – a little bit of software is good. Having said all this, how many things has Google got wrong? Check it out, I’m going to.




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