“You can now video or voice chat with your friends, family and colleagues right from your Android phone, whether they’re on their compatible Android tablet or phone, or using Gmail with Google Talk on their computer,” Google explains. “You can make calls over a 3G or 4G data network (if your carrier supports it) or over Wi-Fi.”

“In your Google Talk friends list, a video or voice chat button will appear next to your contacts and you can simply touch the button to connect with them,” the company adds. “Any text chats from the person you’re talking with will be overlaid on your phone’s screen so you can read them without having to leave the video.”

That’s a nice feature that should leave the conversation in tact, particularly if you’re the type that often forgets what you were saying in the middle of conversations (especially if that conversation is spaced out over time).

“And, if you need to check something else, the video pauses automatically so you can go back to your phone’s home screen or another app,” Google adds. “The audio will keep going even though the video has paused.”

Google says Google Talk with video/voice chat will roll out to Nexus S devices gradually over the coming weeks, as part of the Android 2.3.4 update. It will come to 2.3+ devices later.

Earlier this week, Qik (recently acquired by Skype) launched a new app for Android, along with an update for its iPhone app, which allows video chat between users of both platforms.

The upgrades actually pertain to one of Google Talk’s most advanced features: the voice and video chat plug-in.  As for what they do, users should experience fewer crashes when newer Macs are in the mix and benefit from increased webcam compatibility.

On the Google Talkabout blog, Google also promised increased plug-in stability and “fixes to the infrastructure used to set up and connect your video calls.”
 
This update would be something of a big deal under any circumstances; the last post on the Google Talkabout blog was made in September of last year, so the search giant’s proven that it hasn’t forgotten about this product.

But here’s a (big) added bonus: Jessan Hutchison-Quillian and Mikael Drugge, who are software engineers, wrote “From users who have chosen to ‘Report quality statistics’ in their chat settings, we can see a substantial increase in call connection rates and a big decrease in the call drop rate (see chart below).”

Google Talk looks to be much more useful now.

Gizmo5 is a VoIP firm.  Two recent company blog posts are titled "Introducing GizmoVoice – A Free Phone Line Using Google & Gizmo5" and "Add Gizmo5 Calling Directly To Gmail!" so it’s clear that there are some strong links between it and Google.

Two less obvious details also make them a good match, since the Gizmo5 homepage is dotted with the word "free" (as we all know, Google rarely charges for things) and the Gizmo5 site is available in nine languages (Google loves to serve lots of countries).

Anyway, Michael Arrington, who was the first to write about the rumored acquisition, predicted that Gizmo5 will fill a vital role.  "Gizmo5 will be the glue that puts Google Voice and Google Talk together into a single product," he stated.  "And that product looks a lot like a Skype competitor."

Arrington put Gizmo5′s price at $30 million (in cash).  Gizmo5′s site has since become quite slow, but we’ll keep an eye out for official confirmation.

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Google has released version 1.2.5 of the App Engine software developer kit (SDK) for Python and Java. This happens to be the company’s first simultaneous release for both. The API includes XMPP (also referred to as Jabber) support, which is an open standard for instant messaging. This comes in the form of the XMPP API for both SDKs.

"Like the other APIs that App Engine provides for developers, XMPP is built on the same powerful infrastructure that serves other Google products," says Google on the App Engine Blog. "In this case, we take advantage of the servers that run Google Talk. This new API allows your app to exchange messages with users on any XMPP-based network, including (but not limited to!) Google Talk."

Developers involved with the preview of Google Wave can also use the API to build bots that interact with waves. Wave will be available to schools and businesses this fall, by the way.

"We’re very proud of our first XMPP release, but there’s still more work to do," says Google. "In the future we hope to provide even more functionality to apps, such as user status (presence) and info on new subscriptions."

More information about the API and SDKs can be found in this post. There are links to documentation and release notes available there.

The myTouch 3G will be extremely customizable, unlike Apple’s iPhone. Users will be able to choose menus, wallpapers, icons, themes and skins. Will being customizable be enough to lure iPhone users away?

Has the myTouch 3G already lost to the iPhone, even before its release? Tell us what you think.

The phone will come in three colors: black, white and maroon … err… sorry, I meant distinctive "Merlot". (Why is Merlot a distinctive color?)

A new exclusive app that T-Mobile is hyping is called Sherpa. Below is some detailed info…

Created by Geodelic, Sherpa features GENIE (Geodelic ENgine for Interest Evaluation), a learning engine that automatically customizes itself to the user’s preferences. Through behavior and user feedback, the application learns a person’s likes and dislikes, prioritizing recommended retailers, restaurants and attractions. Seamlessly blending behavior recognition, a recommendation engine and location relevant information, this combination of learning is exclusive to Sherpa and unlike any experience currently on the market.

Below are two lists, the specs and Google services offered on the new myTouch 3G…

• 3.2-inch HVGA touch-screen
• Virtual keyboard (portrait or landscape)
• 3.2 megapixel camera
• Music player (pre-installed 4GB microSD card)
• Enhanced video capabilities
   
• Google Search
• Google Maps (with Street View)
• YouTube
• Picasa
• Gmail
• Google Talk

Sure, the myTouch 3G sounds good on paper… but how, or will, it compete with the iPhone? Ali asked this question the other day, and got some pretty good feedback.

This will be the true test for T-Mobile.

If you’re interested in the myTouch 3G, T-Mobile will begin taking pre-sales on July 8th. The phone itself will be released in early August.

It could have been really bad news if they’d actually followed the destination site’s instructions to enter their Gmail passwords. Called ViddyHo, the website is an obvious phishing ploy to those in the know. But those trusting who appear to be old buddies may have thought it was another application service that asks for access to your email box to populate friends lists.

In this case, it was the old Rickroll out of control. In addition to appearing to be a message from friend, the URL was shortened so that the clicker had no indication of where he or she was clicking out to.

One victim said he thought the message was a from a guy he hadn’t seen in years, and couldn’t resist the enticing LOL that preceded it. Another accompanying message stated “Check this out.”

This latest attack shows that scammers have moved beyond spam and other classic techniques and have begun targeting large, respected companies and social media. Their biggest weapons are various URL shorteners, which reduce and redirect to long URL strings that won’t fit into a microblogging or status update field with character limits. While convenient to regular users, they can be dangerous because a clicker doesn’t know where the link is leading him.

Shortened URLs have left Twitter and Facebook users especially vulnerable.

TinyURL, the service used in the Google Talk attack, blocked links from resolving to the ViddHo site in response. Perhaps the best way to check shortened URLs is to use LongURL.org to verify or to install a Firefox extension that reveal the destination URL upon a mouseover.
 

We measure every server request for every user, every moment of every day. Any millisecond delay is logged. Over the last year, Gmail has been available more than 99.9 percent of the time — for everyone, both consumers and business users. The vast majority of people using Gmail have seen few issues, experienced no downtime, and have continued to have a great Gmail experience, with exception of an outage in August 2008.

If you average all these data together, including the August outage, across the entire Gmail service, there has been an aggregate 10-15 minutes of downtime per month over the last year of providing the service. That 10-15 minutes per month average represents small delays of a couple of seconds here and there. A very small number of people have unfortunately been subject to some disruption of service that affected them for a few minutes or a few hours. For those users, we are very sorry.

Glotzbach then breaks out some research from the Radicati Group showing the amount of downtime other solutions experience, which can account for hours of lost productivity for their users (particularly when IT Staffs are taken by surprise by that downtime). 

So Glotzbach says that Google is extending the 99.9% "guarantee" to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. While Yahoo seems to be obsessing over "openness," it appears Microsoft isn’t the only one doing so over "the cloud."

You can find more details in a Googletalk blog post by Jonas Lindberg and there are more details on the blog of Rich Tehrani.

What you can do is chat to the bot that does Google translations. So for example if you want to translate from English to French, you add en2fr@bot.talk.google.com as one of your contacts. Then whenever you go chat with en2fr, what ever you say will be translated from English to French in the reply from the bot. If you’re a frequent user of Gmail, as I am, you may find this a very useful feature. The translation isn’t perfect but it often will provide what you’re looking for. From French to English, you chat to fr2en@bot.talk.google.com.

At the moment the bot chats are with yourself, meaning you enter a phrase in one language and it appears in yet another. In the not-too distant future we can expect to be able to chat with anyone in our native tongue and have the content translated to our intended audience. Google’s translation bot shows us a baby step in this direction. One can imagine that soon the translation bots will sit between the two parties and allow the users to communicate in real time, each using their own language. As Duncan Riley suggests, Google Talk is getting us one step closer to the ultimate Babel Fish, as envisaged by Douglas Adams in the Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.

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While Google says it’s working on making the feature available for more browsers, AIM through Gmail is only compatible with Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.

Doctor Google: Healthcare Through Search

Among the fastest growing is Meebo, from where users can log in to several different IM clients without downloading an application. Between August 2006 and June 2007, Meebo grew by 354 percent from 434,000 users to 1.972 million.

Multimedia chat providers IMVU, which allows users to create interactive avatars grew by 154 percent over the same time period, from 491,000 users to 1.248 million.

Google Talk beats the other two in number of users, but is third in triple-digit growth, spiking 149 percent to increase from 904,000 users to 2.252 million.

“Now that instant messaging has become an established form of communication, providers are seeking to distinguish themselves with expanded access and additional functionalities. These recent trends in traffic indicate that users are excited about seeing where the technology is going next,” said Jason Lee, media analyst, Nielsen//NetRatings.

However, they’ve all a long row to hoe to catch up with AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo, all of whom have tens of millions of users.