Juzer Burhani

I know it seems hard to believe, but your Google Talk contacts will become... your Google Friends. Everything started last year with an innocent addition to Google Reader: automatically broadcasting your shared items to your friends. If you use Google Reader, you probably noticed that you're subscribed to the shared items from your Google Talk contacts. Many complained that their Google Talk contact list includes many people that are not necessarily friends. "I have business contacts, school contacts, family contacts, etc., and not only do I not really have any interest in seeing all of their feed information, I don't want them seeing mine either," explained a Google Reader user.





But how does someone become your friend in Google Talk? You can send or accept an invitation, but there's another option enabled by default: "Gmail automatically determines which contacts you'll be able to talk to without having to invite each other," based on how frequently you mail each other. And since Gmail contacts include all the people you've ever replied to, you'll end up with a new Google Talk friend after replying 2-3 times to someone's messages.



Here's a screenshot from the recently launched Google Friend Connect, a service that brings social features to ordinary web sites. As you can see, Google Talk is listed next to Facebook, orkut and hi5.





The invisible social network needed a way to expose information about its users, so you can now create a Google Profile. There's even a shortcut for accessing your profile: http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/me.



But without a place where you can share interesting stuff with your friends, Google Talk would be just a virtual social network. iGoogle, the site where you can aggregate all the things you find important, will become Google's main social site when the new version of iGoogle will be released. Among other features, the new iGoogle will add a Google Talk widget, support for OpenSocial applications and a gadget that shows updates from your friends. iGoogle's gadgets and presumably some Google services will be able to push updates to an activity stream that will be shared with your friends, which happen to be the Google Talk contacts. That means your GTalk contacts will be informed when you share a post in Google Reader, when you upload photos in Picasa Web Albums or post a review in Google Maps.





This is actually the Maka-Maka project revealed last year in a confidential Google video that has been accidentally published. "The new central place for social activities will create feeds for all or your events (activity streams) and share them with your contacts," I mentioned in that post.



That means Google Reader's sharing feature was just a rehearsal for a much bigger release that will make the hidden Google Talk social network more visible.

The newfound bonhomie between Yahoo & Google is not just about AdSense, the two companies are connecting their popular IM clients as well.

That means you no longer require any third-party hacks to chat with your Yahoo! Messenger friends using Google Talk and vice-versa.

From the PR: “Yahoo! and Google agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant messaging services bringing easier and broader communication to users.”

Microsoft & Yahoo already offer interoperability between Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger so this gives Yahoo! users the best of both worlds – they can talk with friends on Google Talk as well as those who on are MSN Messenger.

Some Google applications need a lot of time to add even the most basic features. Gmail Chat added the invisible status in February and now this feature is also available in the Google Talk gadget and in Google Talk Labs Edition. Don't ask about the classic Google Talk client, which was last updated in January 2007.

In a previous post, many people argued that it's not wise to add the invisible status because the instant messaging becomes less useful as more people become "invisible". "It's like one-way spying. If you're going to be online to see if your friends are online, at least have the respect to show other people that you're online. What happens if both you and your friend want to talk to each other, but are both on invisible? You'll never discover that you're online," commented Jyvyn.

One solution for this problem could be to show different statuses, depending on your contacts. "What would be most helpful would be some sort of 'group block' or 'group invisible'. I have a number of work contacts that use g-chat so I need to be on and available, but often I am interrupted by friends wanting to chat and I have to ignore them or interrupt my work to explain I can't talk. If I could add all my work contacts to a group, and show my status to them as online, while showing everyone else away, invisible, or even offline - now that would be useful," said nauthiz693.

Integrating Gmail's contact groups with Google Talk is an obvious next step, but this might require many months of coding. After all, adding the invisible status is probably the second most notable feature added by Google Talk this year, after the chatback badges.

Google Labs is indeed busy with their creativity. Recently they released Google Talk Labs Edition with Features of the Google Talk Gadget on your desktop (emoticons, group chat, and more!)
Key elements:
* the password letters are hidden with square blocks instead of rounded ones.
* Contacts and chat in the same window
* cool emoticons
* Desktop reminders from Orkut, Google Calender, Gmail.