As my love affair with Google continues, I bring you two pieces of news that just makes they even more lovable. The first is that Google has proclaimed their IM platform, Google Talk to be an open federation. Quoting straight from the Google Blog, “Open federation is technical jargon for when people on different services can talk to each other.” Email is a federated system. As is the phone service. Can you imagine a world where one is only able to call or e-mail another who subscribes to the same service? I’d have to have a million different e-mail addresses (as opposed to my current 20!) and 10 different phones. Why should IM (and VoIP) be any different? Hooray for Google. As of now, Talk is only compatible with a few smaller players, most of whom proclaimed to be open source anyway. But hopefully the bigger players (Yahoo!, MSN, AIM, and Skype will all follow suite).

The second reason for my extolling the virtues of Google today? This blog entry. Phone companies have been threatening to create a “2-tiered” internet system for a while now. In simple terms, traffic from their own ISP, websites and customers will be given preference on pipes that they own. Unless the big websites (read Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc) pay them a fee. Google has gone ahead and called their bluff. I expect that Yahoo! will soon follow suite.

Now for what may even be termed a rant against Google. Surprised? I recently installed Google Desktop v2. In the 2 days that I’ve had it installed, I didn’t use it all that much. And it seemed to slow down my system a fair bit. I also noticed that my Google searches were taking upwards of half a second now. This is a big change, when I’m used to a response in under one-tenth of a second. By my own admission, I’m a fairly organised person. And this shows on my computer too. I can find almost any file on my PC within a few seconds. However, I can see the use of the software to a person with less technical competencies and a more disorganised lifestyle. If I can find a compelling reason to stay with the Desktop, I may continue with it. Otherwise, it is possible the first piece of Google software that I am disappointed with.