More ways to connect and share with Google Talk

Posted by Mike Jazayeri, Google Talk Product Manager

Millions of you use Google Talk every day to connect with friends, family, and colleagues via chat and calls. Today we're releasing a new version of Google Talk that introduces several more ways to share and connect. You can download it here.

File transfer - This has consistently been the top requested feature, and we've worked hard to make the experience simple, fast, and fun. You can share any type of file, several at a time if you like. We think the photo sharing experience is especially fun.

Voicemail - The name of this feature doesn't do it justice. Yes, you can now leave voicemails for any of your Google Talk contacts when they don't answer a call, but I think the coolest thing is that you can easily record voice notes and send them to anyone you know by just adding their email address to your contact list -- they don't even have to be running Google Talk. This is a fun and easy way to just say hello, send someone a reminder, or even sing your mom happy birthday! Also, our friends on the Gmail team have added a slick voicemail playback experience within Gmail.

Music status sharing - Show your friends what music you listen to and discover new music that your friends are into (or discover that they spend their entire day listening to Barry Manilow... hmm). We also thought it would be fun for you to see the musical tastes of the broader community. So you now have the option of sharing your music listening history with Google, to be included in the rankings of our new Google Labs project called Music Trends.

Finally, we have some updates targeted at developers such as support for a new voice codec which we'll talk about in an upcoming post. And now, I'm off to record that message for my mom...