Chatback launched!

Another cool feature of Talk just shipped. Check out the link over on the right -- if I'm online, you can chat with me, even if you don't have a Google Talk account.

However, I won't be online for a while since I'm leaving for Hawaii early tomorrow morning :)

Cool bot!

A reader of this blog, Bruno Nery, sent me a link to a very cool bot he wrote called rcc. It lets you register yourself as an "expert" on various topics and routes questions about topics to the experts on them. It's an excellent example of a simple, useful tool built on top of XMPP -- I'd love to see more things like this done by third parties. Google Talk is a small team and we don't have time to do even a tiny piece of the cool stuff that XMPP enables -- and the developer community at large has many more ideas about cool stuff than we do!

Google Ski Trip

On the bus ride up, the dangers of many engineers in close confines:

Tour operator/guide: "...and they are planning to install some sort of transportation device, the longest of its kind, between Whistler and Blackcomb peaks. I'm not a skier, so I don't know the name of it, tram? No, maybe it's a French word?"

anonymous voice from the back of the bus: "Trebuchet?"