According to two articles on Digg today, Google has let out two new services into the wild.

The first new feature, is the ability to chat with friends who use chat services other than googletalk, from within g-mail. Check out this link to the Official Google Blog.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/gmail-chat-aim-crazy-delicious.html

Yawn.

Good feature, I guess, but who cares. Googletalk is just another protocol added onto the giant pile of chat protocols out in the wild. While I do enjoy Google programs, I dislike having to use many of their services though a web browser. The times that I am able to use their programs via a client, the experience has been somewhat underwhelming, for example… the googletalk client.

I have thus been driven by the sheer nebulous nature of the instant-message-o-sphere to use Pidgin for all of my instant messaging needs. Its free, expandable, fast, reliable, versatile, works with all of the major IM protocols, and I have no complaints after using it. Google talk simply doesn’t compete.

It is sort of like adding a nice set of new modern seats into a Ford Model-T. Sure it may be more comfortable to use, but its so uncompetitive, it is still not practical for daily use. Google, you can do better. Hey, you could even just buy Pidgin…

Next Google has released a new web interface for the iPhone that makes it much easier to use Google programs and services. Here are some pictures taken from a blog on techcrunch.com, which I found on Digg.

I don’t know about you, but this looks to me like a fantastically simple GUI to use, and particularly suited to one handed phone operation. This is what innovation should provide increasingly more power out of an increasingly intuitive interface. Again, rather than being a client it is accessed via a web browser, but that at the moment is just the nature of the locked down Apple beast.

- The Digital Kitty