qeek.net journal

Yes, Google already owns a social network - Orkut - which is, however, barely known outside countries like Brazil and India. It’s not a surprise then that they decided to sponsor a new project by Carnegie Mellon University?s Human-Computer Interaction Institute called Socialstream.

As listed on the page, the main goals of the project include:

• Rethinkng and reinventing online social networking
• Discovering the user needs related to social networking and exploring how a unified social network service can enhance their experience.
• Creating a system for users to seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks

Socialstream aspires to be a “unified social network” (USN), which means it would be rather an aggregator of social websites we already use, than a new network.

If you are interested in the whole development process and research they have done to make the product better, there’s a lot of information available on the project’s website.

The video below is a nice demonstration of how Socialstream could be used in the future. At the moment though, there’s no information when the project will be launched (if ever).

Google Talk Gadget, the web-based Google Talk client, now has a new feature - the Group Chat. After starting a conversation with your contact, you can invite more people to the chat by choosing the Group Chat option (see the picture below).

This is absolutely no revolutionary update - group chat has been a common feature in other IM clients for ages, but anyway it’s nice to have such option available in my favorite messenger (hopefully, Group Chat will be added to the stand-alone application as well).

If I had to pick the next feature to be implemented into Google Talk, how about Conference Calling?

Tags: google, chat, im