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Google

Google They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free. Google Talk enables you to call or send instant messages to your friends for free�-anytime, anywhere in the world. Google Talk offers you choice. You can get in touch how and when you want to, over e-mail, IM, or a call. The application also offers you quality; you can talk through your computer and hear your friends as if they were in the same room. Finally it offers you convenience. Your Gmail contacts are preloaded into Google Talk so inviting or talking to your friends is only a click away.
Google Talk is in beta and requires a Gmail username and password.



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Should you chat with Google?

It was only a matter of time before Google got into the chat game like many of its competitors have done. Although the beta version of Google Talk is free and has no glaring glitches, its bare-bones approach makes it less of a must-have than some of the company's other downloadable products.
To use Google Talk, you must already have a Gmail e-mail account. While most resourceful users shouldn't have too much trouble finding a Gmail invite, this hurdle may prevent some folks from trying the client. The program's clean, white, ad-free interface looks very similar to other IM applications, displaying a list of your contacts' e-mail addresses and their status. Right-clicking a contact gives you the ability to change the name. Similar to other chat clients from big-name companies, Google's offering provides both text and voice-based messenging. In our tests, the sound quality of voice chats was consistently good, and we didn't experience any problems while conversing via text.
You won't find much in the way of groundbreaking features; in fact, Google Talk lacks many of the standards. For instance, you can't set a display picture, use emoticons, or view your chat history. It also would be nice if the program included a voicemail option and let you have group conversations. It's cool that the pop-up e-mail notifications show you the sender and a brief preview of the message in your in-box, but that more of a small bonus. While we're confident an official release of this program will address some of its shortcomings, there's no urgent reason to switch to Google Talk at the current time.