Google Talk as a Contact Database
(This is a shorter version of a longer post at my sister blog, ten minut.es, which take a 10 minute look at new and old products, services and websites.)
One of the most undersung corners of the Google empire, in my view, is Google Talk, the search giant's chat application (non Windows users can launch its gadget browser version.)
For one thing, it's so uncluttered it makes every other chat application look like the aftermath of Christmas dinner. It's smooth, fast and the sound quality is good. But what I think it's best for are the features that aren't really features. (Most of these won't be useful if you don't use Gmail.)
For example, searching for a contact's email address is faster in GTalk than other applications I can find. Outlook is so slow it's horrible and Google Desktop won't really help you since the email address you're looking for, if it appears at all, will be via an email address or something, even if you've set Google Desktop to index your contacts:
Google Talk does this much better. So long as you've selected the Add people I communicate with often to my Friends List (Settings/General)
GoogleTalk will add these names to its list, so that when you start typing their name in the search line their names will appear below, even if they're not a Google Talk user:
Move your mouse over one of the entries and their contact details will appear:
Clicking on the email address (in blue) will either create a new message in Gmail or a new message in your default email client, depending on whether you've selected Open Gmail when I click on email links or not in your Settings:
Now you have a quick way of scouring your contact book and creating emails. It's possibly only marginally quicker than clicking on Compose Mail in Gmail, but I find Google Talk so fast it works well for me.
I feel Google could go further with this. What I'd love is if it could include in its search not just names but towns and other fields stored in your Gmail contact database. If I could quickly trawl through all my Gmail contacts for specific interests (who should I chat to about satellites and medical emergencies, for example) Google Talk would become a sort of first stop for organising my otherwise untamable contact list. (At the moment the best solution for this is my old favorite, PersonalBrain, which I've written about before.)
It's not perfect, by any means. The built-in Chat within Gmail seems to have features that aren't replicated in Google Talk, which would make this a better tool. Allowing you to include your AIM contacts inside Chat is one (unless I'm much mistaken this won't work in Google Talk). The other is that when you add extra detail to your address book in Gmail -- adding a photo, say -- this information appears nicely inside the Gmail Chat:
but not in Google Talk:
I'd like to see Google improve on this.
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