For once, I’m not the last person to hear about something months later.

Google Talk sounds exciting. No voice-capable Mac client for it, but Adium and iChat both work. If nothing else, it’ll educate the masses about the “Jabber” protocol.

Google does have gobs of cash, and it’s lots of fun seeing what they can do with it. What I wish they’d really do is start a mobile phone company, because I would imagine it wouldn’t suck nearly as much as Verizon and others. But that’s merely a pipe dream.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how this affects IM users, if it’ll catch on or not. I still don’t understand why AIM and MSN and others don’t open up their protocols. Maybe Google is what it takes to get people to realize if they use an open protocol (Jabber) they can talk to *anybody.*

However, I wonder if Google plans on using its ads technology for scanning IM’s and displaying ads while chatting or the like? That would kill it for me. I can put up with it in emails, somehow. It’s unobtrusive, and they’re giving me a couple of gigs of space. But for IM’s … for some reason that would cross a line for me. Not sure why.

It will be fun, though, to see if they can do a lot of cool integration like they’ve been doing with their other services. Phone messaging, search, blogging, etc.