Google today released a beta of their IM applet, Google Talk. It is currently available for Windows 2000+ only and requires a gmail account. It is a thin client, offering only basic chatting and voice. It has a very clean interface, with no bells and whistles (unless you count the sounds as whistles, or bells).

Although many of my readers would think that Open Stndards are the best feature, for me it is the ability to put bold and italic words mid-sentence, by typing *bold* and _italic_. The worst feature would have to be that my computer loses the ability to display dialog boxes while GT is running. When I minimise GT to the tray, I get error messages instead of dialogs and as soon as I exit GT all of my dialogs work again. Do No Evil indeed.

If you do not have a gmail account, and want one, comment below and I will invite you. The GT software can be downloaded from Google Talk.