As an engineer, one of my favorite aspects of delivering Google Talk through the web is that we can enhance it quickly. In fact, we updated the Google Talk Gadget today with a few new features:
(1) To make it easier to use Google Talk anywhere, we made it possible to pop out the Google Talk Gadget into a separate window. If you're using Google Talk on your Google Personalized Homepage, you'll find a link in right inside the gadget that lets you pop it out. You can also find the popout version of the gadget at http://www.google.com/talk.
(2) For website owners and bloggers, we announced earlier that you can add Google Talk to your own webpage with a single line of code. To take advantage of the new pop-out functionality, we created a new way to add Google Talk to your website: a button you can add that lets your visitors launch Google Talk in a separate window.
To add the button, just copy and paste this script into your site's HTML:
(3) We also wanted to highlight a way to use the gadget that others discovered shortly after our first release. If you use Firefox, you can run the gadget in your Firefox sidebar, so it stays open when you navigate from page to page in the main frame. Just click on the link below:
Google Talk Sidebar
You can also bookmark Google Talk for your sidebar in Firefox. Right click on the link above. Select "Bookmark this Link," then "Create In: Bookmarks Toolbar." Next open the Bookmarks menu from the Firefox menu bar, right click on the Google Talk bookmark entry, and select "Properties." In the menu that opens, check the box that says: "Load this bookmark in the sidebar."
When you open the bookmark, the gadget will load in the sidebar on the left.
(4) We also added some new media viewing capability to the gadget. In addition to watching YouTube videos and Picasa Web Albums slideshows, you can now also view Flickr photo slideshows by pasting URLs from Flickr into your chats.
We look forward to adding more and more features to the gadget. And you don't need to do anything to get the updates. Each time you load the gadget you will have the latest version.
Scott Ludwig
Software Engineer Permalink | Links to this post |
