Attention Nerds! A new gadgets API for communication

I spent my youth writing games on a computer hooked up to my parents' television but despite saving my pennies to buy a 300-baud modem, I was never able to realize my dream of writing a game that my best friend and I could play against each other on two computers. In all my games the I,J,K and M keys were used by player 1 while player 2 was stuck with W,A,S and Z on the same keyboard.

This was in the back of my mind when I started putting my 20% time towards building a simple javascript library on top of our Google Talk web client. After some demos, my 20% project grew to an 80% project, and we're now ready to show off -- and get feedback on -- the gadgets.realtime set of APIs. These APIs will let Google gadgets hosted in different user's browsers communicate with each other. The first API, gadgets.sharedstate, is available on the new Talk Developer Sandbox. With this API, you can share an object between instances of a gadget, and be notified in realtime when the other instance modifies it. More APIs and UI improvements to allow gadgets.realtime gadgets to be used on orkut and iGoogle are in the works and coming soon.















For more information and for sample applications, see the documentation.

We've set up a discussion group to collect feedback. So, help me out, fellow geeks! Try out this API and let me know what you think and share any cool gadgets you write.

Moishe Lettvin, Software Engineer

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Show your Talk buddies where you are

Google Latitude is a service that allows you to see where your friends are on a map in real time. You can choose whether to share your location with any or all of your friends and can display what you are up to with a status messages. And now there is a new feature that makes it easy to automatically share your location with your Google Talk buddies. Read more on the Google Apps blog.

Brian Hutchins
Product Marketing Manager

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All Orkut users can chat

Hi Orkut users! For those of you who didn't have Gmail enabled for your account or use a gmail.com user name, you may have found it odd that Google Talk was not available in Orkut for you. Well, now we are enabling chat for all Orkut accounts, without the Gmail requirement. Any Orkut user will be able to chat on the Google Talk network using their existing email address as their user name! We are in the process of turning it on for everybody, so if you don't see it yet then it's coming soon.

For added security, we require a simple email verification to use this new feature. Click here to learn how to verify your account.

Those of you who have been paying closer attention might have noticed that chat for non-Gmail accounts already works in the new version of iGoogle (available for some users, coming soon to everyone). The Talk server team has been working behind the scenes to make this possible. We've engineered a solution that allows you to chat using an email address that is not hosted at Google, while preserving our existing interoperability with 3rd party XMPP clients and server-to-server communication with other XMPP networks.

Talk in Gmail is great, and we are really excited about putting Talk in other fun and useful places. If you already have a Google account, you're all set.

Adam Fass,
Software Engineer

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Chat on iGoogle

You can now chat right from iGoogle, Google’s personalizable homepage, while checking news, watching videos, or playing games. iGoogle chat works from your browser, like Gmail chat, and you can exchange instant messages with any of your contacts that have an iGoogle, Gmail, or Google Talk account. To read more about iGoogle chat, check out this post on the Official Google blog.


















Posted by Rhett Robinson, Google Talk Engineer

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Voice and video chat now in Gmail

We are happy to announce the release of voice and video chat in Gmail. Now you can chat in high quality audio and video with your Google Talk contacts from Gmail. Check out the details on the Gmail blog and the Official Google blog.

Serge Lachapelle
Product Manager, Stockholm

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New Google Talk Help Forum

Got a burning question about how to best use Google Talk? Today we launched a new Forum within Google Help that allows you to ask questions about Google Talk and have them answered by both Google employees and other Google Talk fans. We believe this new platform will make it even easier for you to find help, and for Google employees and fans to share their knowledge of the product.

Particularly great answers can be marked as a "Best Answer", so people with a similar problem can find a solution quickly and easily. The Google Help Forum also keeps track of how active a user is in the Forum. For example, you can see who is a Google Employee, top contributor, seasoned poster, or new poster.



And don't worry, we aren't removing the ability to search and read our old Google Talk Help Group content, but we have closed it from any additional posts. So, if you do have a question regarding Google Talk, go ahead and ask it!

Dana Jermanis
Google Help Team

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New transliteration bots make it easy to chat in Indian languages

Have you ever wished that you could chat with your family and friends in your native language? Sometimes there's just no substitute for expressing a thought in your own language. Google Talk now has transliteration bots that will convert text from English to Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil or Telugu. Think of a bot as an invited guest to your chat session that will transliterate what you type in English to the right local script. For those who are not familiar with transliteration, it is a service provided by Google India that allows you to type in Indian languages using phonetically equivalent English script (it is also available on our labs page, orkut scraps and blogger). If you're chatting in Hindi, when you type 'haal kaisa hai janab ka?' the en2hi.translit@bot.talk.google.com bot will reply in Hindi as 'हाल कैसा है जनाब का?'

There are currently 5 transliteration bots - Hindi (en2hi.translit), Kannada (en2kn.translit), Malayalam (en2ml.translit), Tamil (en2ta.translit) and Telugu (en2te.translit), and remember that their names end with "@bot.talk.google.com". To use one of these bots follow these three steps:

1) First add the bot that you want to your friend's list. (For example, add en2hi.translit@bot.talk.google.com for Hindi). You just need to do this once.
2) Start a chat session with your friend
3) Convert the chat session to a group chat and invite the bot to it.

Read this to know more about the bots, and let us know what you think.

तो शुरू हो जाइए...

Kuntal Loya
Software Engineer

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