Google Talk Usurps AOL

Google found a way to get me to download Google Talk once again. I've been using Miranda for a while (and still will--for all five of my IMing accounts), but now I need to have Google Talk to go with it.

Basically, the ability to send a voicemail to any address (Gmail email or otherwise) was too good. That's as good, if not better than being able to download voicemail from Vonage! And then the music playing status feature along with their new Music Trends is just too handy.

Of course, it would be nice if CMRadio.net displayed their titles in a way that made more common for dividing title and artist.

Adding online notification is handy, too. Miranda doesn't have that. Google Talk may have had that for a while though.

What I find so intriguing about this development is not just that Google has far surpassed AOL in its products, but that it beat AOL in integrating two of AOL's own products: instant messaging and music playing! No, neither IMing nor MP3 playing started with AOL, but they currently own top players in both markets (AIM and Winamp), and yet never thought to tie the two together. And Google doesn't even have an MP3 player!