One of the newest messengers is Google Talk. It is a messaging and voice program that is simple and basic.  It does not have features like avatars, smilies, typing sounds, colourful or large chat text.

Google Talk allows you to chat with people based on your Gmail contacts or who people you have invited to use the program.  When your friends are online you can send them a message or call them, when they are offline you can email them with your Gmail account.

Some of the extra features that Google Talk offers are email notifications, message notifications, which show up at the bottom right hand corner of your desktop. You can minimize the program so you can type on other programs while at the same time being able to read new messages.  If you want to have your friends name come up instead of their email address you can assign nick names to them.

If you don’t use your Gmail account it is difficult to long into Google Talk. You account will be locked due to inactivity. But if you change your password and try again in a while it will fix the issue.

This program is a great program to use.  It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that other programs use.  It is a lot like ICQ when it first came out for instant messaging.

This program doesn’t allow multi-messaging and you can not use webcams or group chat rooms. But it does allow you to have custom status, allow you to see when someone is typing to you, and you can log messages.