Yuuguu’s Ten Minutes September 12, 2008
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in chat, collaboration, screen sharing.add a comment
What it is: Yuuguu (from the Japanese word for fusion) is “a solution to help people work together remotely, through any firewall, across different platforms, with as many colleagues as needed, just as if they were sat right next to each other.”
Executive summary: Good way to quickly get up and running and share screens and chat online with colleagues and friends. Don’t expect cute graphics; the name is about the only Web 2.0 thing about this service. And the price: free.
Installation is pretty smooth. A 10 MB download, the usual installation stuff:
You sign up from the application itself:
It’s cute enough to try to figure out your name from your email address. Always a good sign.
You can add people manually, or have Yuuguu find them for you:
It’s early days, I guess: No one I knew seemed to have an account, or it didn’t find them:
Which was weird because I know at least one person using it who is also in my address book:
Still, it works pretty well from there on, if you don’t mind the Java feel to it all. Add contacts and you can share screens straightaway, either at high res or faster low resolution:
Both seemed to work even on slower connections. You can chat at the same time:
You can also get cheap international calls through the software, though I didn’t try that.
Verdict: There are other products out there, and they may be as good, but this is a good simple effort for collaborating, or, as the company says, just surfing and co-habiting online.
Google Talk’s Ten Minutes January 6, 2008
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in chat, email, organizers.2 comments
One of the most undersung corners of the Google empire, in my view, is Google Talk, the search giant’s chat application.
For one thing, it’s so uncluttered it makes every other chat application look like the aftermath of Christmas dinner. It’s smooth, fast and the sound quality is good. But what I think it’s best for are the features that aren’t really features. (Most of these won’t be useful if you don’t use Gmail.)
Google Talk as a Contact Database
For example, searching for a contact’s email address is faster in GTalk than other applications I can find. Outlook is so slow it’s horrible and Google Desktop won’t really help you since the email address you’re looking for, if it appears at all, will be via an email address or something, even if you’ve set Google Desktop to index your contacts:
Google Talk does this much better. So long as you’ve selected the Add people I communicate with often to my Friends List (Settings/General)
GoogleTalk will add these names to its list, so that when you start typing their name in the search line their names will appear below, even if they’re not a Google Talk user:
Move your mouse over one of the entries and their contact details will appear:
Clicking on the email address (in blue) will either create a new message in Gmail or a new message in your default email client, depending on whether you’ve selected Open Gmail when I click on email links or not in your Settings:
Now you have a quick way of scouring your contact book and creating emails. It’s possibly only marginally quicker than clicking on Compose Mail in Gmail, but I find Google Talk so fast it works well for me.
I feel Google could go further with this. What I’d love is if it could include in its search not just names but towns and other fields stored in your Gmail contact database. If I could quickly trawl through all my Gmail contacts for specific interests (who should I chat to about satellites and medical emergencies, for example) Google Talk would become a sort of first stop for organising my otherwise untamable contact list. (At the moment the best solution for this is my old favorite, PersonalBrain, which I’ve written about before.)
Still, even now, it’s an underused gem that I recommend you giving a shot if you’re a Gmail user.
Some other quick tips:
You can use Google Talk to update your Jaiku status messages (I can’t actually remember how to do this, but will try to find out). You can translate phrases via Google Talk (more here on that).
It’s not perfect, by any means.
Some gripes:
If you have more than a few contacts they slip off the bottom of the screen and there’s no way to prioritise them, or organize them into groups. (Removing the pictures is the best way to reduce the footprint of each contact. So if your list looks like this:
click on the View button at the bottom and deselect Show pictures
So your contacts will take up only one line (mostly; those who have set their presence will remain on two lines, but will still take up less screen space):
Another gripe: the built in Chat within Gmail seems to have features that aren’t replicated in Google Talk. Allowing you to include your AIM contacts inside Chat is one (unless I’m much mistaken this won’t work in Google Talk). The other is that when you add extra detail to your address book in Gmail — adding a photo, say — this information appears nicely inside the Gmail Chat:
but not in Google Talk:
I’d like to see Google improve on this.
You can’t select text within a Google Talk chat (you need to select it from the history of the chat.)
There’s no Google Talk client available for Mac or Linux, though you can load a “gadget” version that appears as a popup within your browser which does nearly all the things I’ve mentioned):
The other problem is that not many of my friends are actually on there. They prefer Skype, as, usually, do I. But if you’re a heavy Gmail user it may make sense to try to persuade them to switch.
For more information on Google Talk, check out the official blog, and an unofficial one called Customize Talk. Oh and if you’ve got suggestions for how to improve Google Talk, add ‘em here.
