Why Google, WHY!

Posted by Richard White Wed, 15 Feb 2006 02:06:00 GMT

In theory the idea of logging my google talk chats in gmail is probably a decent idea but in practice its been an absolute nightmare. There has been much pain and gnashing of teeth of those of us unlucky enough to click “Log my Google Talk chats in GMail”. Lets review the major plot points of this surprise horror flick:

Soon after clicking said button I had one of the most painful IM experiences of my life. Ever have one of those conversations where the whole conversation gets out of sync, I reply to something 4 lines ago and then they in return reply thinking I was replying to what was said 2 lines ago… mass confusion. Well that’s basically how this conversation went except on a magnitude I have never quite experienced. The culprit? Google Talk, it was relaying the messages approximately 15-25 minutes after they were sent?. We finally figured that part out and jumped on to AIM to chat. I still got IMs on google talk about 30 minutes later from that conversation. Needless to say that was the last time I will use Google Talk except as a notifier for when I have GMail.
What is all this shit all over GMail!?. A popup every time I rollover an email asking me to chat with that person? Let me count the number of times I would do that rather than just IMing that person with my IM client of choice. Never mind that the people I email and the people I IM are more mutually exclusive than inclusive. And I love finding popup chat windows in GMail when I’ve already had that conversation on my desktop client.
GMail has been slow and buggy ever since the roll out. That is understandable for any sort of major roll out like this, but it still sucks.

Never mind I have hardly anyone on my Google Talk list, and I’m sure I’m not alone on that, so even if this was a feature I might want its pretty useless when it doesn’t work with AIM or YIM. I understand that this is probably Google’s way of trying to change that, leveraging their large email base to try and give them an easy way to convert to Google Talk, but the incentives just aren’t there yet.

Yes, logging and search would be very nice for an IM client, but I can’t move all my contacts to it and even if I could I wouldn’t want to use GMail as my chat desktop. There are a lot of desktop to web app shifts going on but I think email is a long way off (if ever).

And for pete’s sake give me a conspicuously placed checkbox to opt out of all these bloody popups.