google talk

so i get back from a short city trip to venice, with little or no broadband connectivity, only to find out that our friends at google just launched there own im/voip service: google talk. of course, that's great news. because finally there's a worthy contender to the, until now pretty dominant, skype service. even though it's still in beta, it looks pretty nice, supporting open standards such as xmpp (jabber) and in the future also sip, according to the developer faq. apparently skype has reacted, by "opening up" its platform.

for once, we'll let google point you to the news items that popped up everywhere.