Summary

Use Google Talk to communicate with all your friends, either by typing instant messages, carrying on complete chat sessions, using voice chat, or if you can change your status fast enough, send Morse code messages. Okay, the last thing was just a joke. Get all your friends to sign up for Google Talk, whether they have Gmail accounts or not. The Google Talk client is free and easy to use and integrates well with your Gmail account.

To communicate with other Google Talk users and to stay on top of what’s new in Google Talk, try the Google Talk Blog at http://googletalk.blogspot.com/.

Google Talk is more than simply the Google Talk client. It’s an entire Open messaging service that can be accessed by many instant message clients. For a complete list of clients accessing the service, visit www.google.com/talk/otherclients.html.

Finally, because Google Talk does not support video chatting you will want to read the next chapter about how to use Picasa to share pictures with your friends.