A little Google Talk interest
I’ve been experimenting a little with Google Talk over the last few days, primarily with the intention of introducing my mother to it. Her sister lives in Canada and is flying over to visit us this week. When she goes home, though, my aunt plans to finally buy herself a computer and I’m wondering whether I can get the two of them chatting on-line. Partially this would be so that they can communicate more often than phone calls a couple of months and also to give my aunt a private way to chat when she doesn’t want her housemate to overhear her.
The problem is that they’re both complete technophobes. My aunt is probably worse than my mom, but not by much. Instant messaging is a concept that they’re both figuring is too new-fangled and complicated for them.
Hence my experimentation with Google Talk. In the past I’ve had both AIM and Yahoo IM set up and not really liked either, which is problematic coming from a geek. A Jabber or Trillian type program would be perfect for me, but probably too much for my aunt to set up on her own. Mom has been considering changing from her current email provider and she seems quite interested in setting up a Gmail account. We could easily set up a Gmail account for my aunt while she’s here, saving her from the scary side of first steps on the Internet. And my experiments this week have shown exactly how easy it is to set up Google Talk - quite literally, you download and go. That should be just right for my aunt. And chatting is wonderfully easy. Er, too easy because I can now chat to friends at daft times 
I don’t plan to use Google Talk for VoiP telephone much - I’m still concerned about security stuff there and I don’t have a microphone set up on this computer. But I did receive a call from a friend in the States today. We’ve been emailing and chatting for around four years, but never spoken in person. Until today - she called and talked, I typed back. Her kids even said hi. It was wonderful. I finally know what her voice sounds like. I’m going to do some more reading up on the security, pricing and so on before instigating return calls, but it was absolutely wonderful to hear her voice for the first time.
I suspect that the reason I’ve never got into IM-ing before is because I know how addictive it could be. But it is good to chat to people in real time rather than some of the long-winded email conversations I have!