Google talk...rockz

At least at my place...because somehow the voice works here! even though we have a pretty strict firewall which won't allow skype or yahoo voice chat to go through...maybe it also likes google! but then I 've used skype and yahoo voice chat too(from outside) and believe me they don't come near to google...there are a lot of reasons for this
1) Google, because it is god, has bestowed upon us the lightest and most effective client on us...which just works! And because this is "beta" there are not even smileys supported yet the way the UI behaves with you, it's almost amazing and firms one's belief that there are still programmers who write code that is *efficient*. well here is an example why Google is repected so much...yesterday I went to city and came back after 3-4 hours and in the meantime I got around 10 new friend requests(talk has become *the* messenger in virtually no time==one day) and had it been a yahoo or MSN it would have had 10 different windows...but GOD is different all it said that you have a lot of friend requests coming ...would you like to view all of them ! not a big deal
if(friend_request>4)
{printf("blah balh blah");
....
}
well something like that...but thats what is innovation, thats what indicates that a skilled UI designer has worked on it for long hours, thinking of each and every possibilities and tweaks and thats what makes Google what it is today. It's UI still remains so simple yet so powerful.
2) You have to use it to realize it that voice quality is *actually* better than what we have in most of the cell phone networks! This suggests the kind of bandwidth that google is offering to this project. I talked to a friend last night for 2 hours and not even once I experienced any lag or disruption.
3) Well the way Google talk is integrated to gmail is amazing. Yet again the UI designer @ google comes into picture. Yahoo despite beng in this business for so long has not realized that it's mail notification service needs a major revamp.
There are other reasons such as use of open source protocol such as jabber which is scalable and open, thus would allow third party clients to be coded without the dirty work of "protocol breaking"...this has already enabled trillion, gaim et al to connect to gaim, although voice support is missing.
What I dislike about google talk is that there is no client for linux and hence I am forced to boot into windows :((