A NY Times article reports Google executives as saying:

… they plan to unveil on Wednesday a “communications tool” that is potentially a clear step beyond the company’s search-related business focus.

While executives would not disclose what the new software tool might be, Google has long been expected to introduce an instant messaging service to compete with services offered by America Online, Yahoo and MSN from Microsoft.

In my opinion Google should skip releasing a standalone IM client. They sort of already have IM capability with Hello (although that’s a part of their picture service). Instead, they should go after and buy Skype — or something like it, maybe — for something that has chat and IMO the more valuable voice services.

I think IM services by themselves are already too crowded a field, even for Google to jump in and say: “Ok, we’re here now too.” I mean, how many different IM clients can a person run? Sure, tools like Qnext and Trillian help reduce program clutter but it makes more sense to have a single chat service that they blended into their existing services like the Google Desktop, Gmail, search, maps, etc. If they bought an already established service they wouldn’t have to go through the registered user building process.

And that’s the biggest knock for Gizmo, BTW, they don’t have any chat (yet) and don’t have enough registered users. Gizmo is getting good reviews and some are saying it’s better than Skype, but until they have the users and the competing features (which Skype has spent a couple years refining now) then there is no real comparison.

BTW, I just re-downloaded the Google Desktop engine. I saw that they have a (new? yup, it’s new!) sidebar feature. I use Desktop Sidebar and I compared the two programs. One thing I like about the Google Sidebar is that it watches what pages you visit and can automatically populate your “web clips” area. Note, they don’t call it RSS or Atom, but when you click on the options you’ll see where you can manually add RSS or Atom feed URLs. Unfortunately no OPML import, so I’d have to click through on the 350+ RSS/Atom feeds I read in order to populate the Google Desktop Sidebar. Hmm, think that might take awhile.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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