Google Talk Gadget

I hadn’t heard about this, before randomly going to talk.google.com today. The Google Talk Gadget is a web client for GTalk, just like the one that sits inside Gmail, but a bit more complex and stand-alone.

I particularly loved the tabs for contacts and chats. And talk about intuitive: I tried Ctrl+Tab and it worked!! :-) [Ok, just found out now that it's only Tab]

I haven’t tested it yet, but apparently it even supports voice chat. And group chat.

The downside: it’s in Flash, not AJAX, so it might not work everywhere. And there are some missing features here and there, but they have my much-beloved (almost) one-click feedback feature, so you can do as I do and start swamping them with suggestions and complaints.

A more contextual alternative to email

Inspired by Shrikant Joshi’s comment at TechCrunch I decided to put some thought to how email can be “more contextual”.

When I think of “contextual”, I imagine a local, distributed, on-the-spot sort of thing. I imagine embedded.

So my idea of “more contextual”, on these few minutes I put myself thinking about it, is a web application that would allow me to centralize all my text communication into one place.

To date, we have Gmail + Gtalk. You bind together two forms of textual communication into one place, go through your chat history as you would through your regular email, that sort of thing (plus google/yahoo groups).

Now throw into that your blog comments, your flickr comments and mostly any kind of text stuff you drop around on the web everyday. Imagine those being entered through an embedded “drop box” that, besides leaving your text on the website you are, direct it back to your email, saving information about the website, allowing replies to come in and go back as if you were responding to a normal email (coComment generalized and integrated to email).

This idea of a embedded drop box for entering text throughout the web allows for an extension of the Gmail+Gtalk concept in which, instead of centralizing the applications into one place before integrating them, centralizes the incoming and responding, while pulverizing the outgoing.

That would be “contextual” to me.