Dirson (he found talk.google.com is live, but not responding) and many others, including the NYT yesterday, have been speculating about a new communications tool promised out of the Googleplex for tomorrow. I’ve heard it’s anything from an IM client to full blown free WiFi for the masses. I have no special insight into this, but I do believe IM is a no brainer. MSFT, Yahoo, and AOL all have IM clients. IM ties folks to a platform, and that’s what Google is building with Desktop et al. VOIP is another possibility. Om and others have found that Google is running a Jabber client, for example, and speculate that Google is about to introduce a VOIP/IM meta client that works with multiple IM clients. That would certainly be cool.
In any case, stay tuned. The other shoe will drop Weds.