The Future of Gtalkr: A Chat With the Developer

If you haven’t heard of Gtalkr, you should definately check it out. Gtalkr brings the power of Google Talk into your browser, but it does even more than that. (I blogged about Gtalkr back in December.) GTalkr also integrates Yahoo Maps, Gmail (but of course!), offers a downloadable notifier, and now you can even add RSS feeds that you can view on your Gtalkr page. What’s nice about services like Gtalkr is that you can use the Google Talk service without having to download the app itself. Any upgrades to Google Talk will be available in Gtalkr as well…and since Google is now best friends with AOL, mabye we will see AIM integration soon?

So, what does the future hold with Gtalkr? Well, I had an interesting conversation (via Gtalkr, of course) with one of the developers. Nice guy. He tells me that they are working on some other extensions for the service, with del.icio.us being high on that list — yes!. Additionally, they are working on integrating libjingle. Here’s what he had to say: "Well, the straightforward benefit from integrating libjingle would be to get audio in Gtalkr. However, we’re more interested in the file transfer aspect of the p2p sessions negotiated using libjigle. Libjingle is a generic platform for negotiating p2p and there’s a lot of power in that…file transfer and file sharing…Video would be the next step after voice."

Video, guys! Video! Even though Google is getting into the commercial video service space, they haven’t integrated video into Google Talk. Gtalkr may beat them to the punch! Very cool stuff.

You know what’s another nice feature of Gtalkr is? The ability to view a log of your entire conversation with one of your contacts…and to search those logs by keyword. Nice. (Not to worry - I made sure that it was okay to post from our chat before doing so!)