Google Talk in other clients

melo@simplicidade.org (Pedro Melo) — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 18:03:20 +0000

I (Sean) have been hired by Google, moved to Seattle, and have been working on the Google Talk team for about a month and a half. The goal of Google Talk is to make real-time communication as open as possible, and in that regard, I’ve been working to offer all of Google Talk’s features into other clients. Currently, I’m working on making it as easy as possible for other clients to use Google Talk’s voice features. You can expect Gaim and other clients to be interoperable with Google Talk’s voice features in the near future.

Good, maybe they could start by documenting the protocol and let us all help out.

skype for mac

melo@simplicidade.org (Pedro Melo) — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 10:23:52 +0000

I installed the skype client for Mac some weeks ago, as soon as it was released. I’ve been letting it running in the background since then, and I used it 5 times at most.

I was interested because I would like to have a cross platform voice solution. My wife used Windows XP, and I would like to talk to her with VoIP as I’m away from home three to four days each week.

My problem with skype is that you can never be sure the kind of performance you’ll get. Most of the time, my skype connection goes to the US before reaching the other side. We are both in the same provider, in Portugal, so this seems a bit stupid.

I know that the peer-to-peer design of skype is the root of this problems, but that makes skype inadequate for my purpose. I have tried the AIM 5.5 client (I use iChat AV everyday) but couldn’t get it to work. I think I’ll have to try harder.

In terms of voice quality, if you get a good peer, it’s very good. But you cannot trust it to perform always at that level, due to it’s design. In that respect, the iChat AV/AIM client is better. The quality is not as good, but it’s reliable (when tested between iChat’s…). And it supports video also, allowing me to put my iSight camera to good use.

I also tried skype out with some friends in england. They where having a conference call: 2 guys with skype, calling Pedro via mobile phone, and me via fixed phone. It did work, the quality was acceptable, but it was very confusing.

Let’s wait and see if the final version is better, but the peer-to-peer design doesn’t seem a good one to me.

Voip on Notes

Google Talk in other clients

skype for mac