Google Talk Already Exists?
Little did I know upon writing an overview of the rumors and leaks leading to the launch of Google’s anticipated IM and VOIP client, Google Talk; that Google Talk already exists. Seems that alot of the buzz centered around the talk.google.com subdomain could be an internal Google joke to sway industry speculators from the truth and onto the Google Talk decoy. Well, maybe not. But, after doing numerous searches for jabber related papers, xmpp feed projects, and Google patents I then did a simple search for “google talk” and found this definition from Answers.com (via Wikipedia).
Google Talk is a word game which uses Google to complete a sentence. The player thinks of a beginning of a sentence and searches Google for it. She or he takes from the first search result the next word which follows the sentence and appends it. When the sentence grows longer than four or five words, words are dropped from the beginning. By repeating this, random funny and interesting sentences are generated.
Various web sites implement the Google Talk algorithm for convenience. The actual algorithms used may differ and produce different results.
Is the Google Talk subdomain a decoy to generate buzz around an imaginary Google Messaging product while Google goes off and launches some music download service or Wi-Fi mega ISP? Is it along the same lines of humor as Google’s Pigeon Rank? I reckon we’ll all have to wait until tomorrow and see. In the meantime, here are some more sites centered around the Google Talk word game : 8 Ways to Sunday, Naver, and Milk & Cookies.
