Google’s little foray into instant messaging recently celebrated its first birthday by introducing file transfers and voicemail. The voicemail sends through GMail, but oddly you can’t record messages from the web client yet. The file-transfers are predictably non-resumeable, but otherwise gold. The drag-drop functionality is much the same as WASTE, you can drag one or more files, or an entire folder onto the conversation window and have it send as one package (including any subfolders). The GTalk development cycle thus far has been way slower than we’d all like, we’re talking Gaim-slow… but they show loads of potential. So much potential that I’m calling this one as if it were a hockey pool: GTalk will win! I mean “win” as in “GMail currently wins in the free webmail market”, and they win HARD. The lads and lasses at Google are committed to delivering the awesomest stuff, and GMail is living proof.

Besides that and being a Google fanboy, how can I be so sure? First: their mission statement seems vastly different from that of Live Messenger or AIM. It feels like GTalk is aiming for a spot in the workplace like Skype, while the other first-party IM clients become increasingly similar to an application version of Myspace. An other-worldly force stayed GTalk’s hand when MSN and Yahoo gave their messengers “winks” and “nudges”. Better to appeal a little bit to everyone than to appeal to one demographic in a big way. I can’t think of any CIO that would be cool with their employees using something as cartoonish as windows live messenger on the job.

Secondly: Google’s “commitment” to open standards inspired them to build GTalk on Jabber (an open, xml-based protocol suite). Jabber’s coolest feature is its expandability. That’s how you can send files and voice over Jabber today with GTalk, with display pictures positioned neatly in the corner.

Here’s a list of features I think Google Talk needs to improve its currently-modest success.
(in random order)

• Webcam support
• Conference call/chat/video
• Invisible / “Appear offline” mode
• Third-party add-ons
• Inline spell-checking

Features it absolutely does NOT need include nudges/winks, games, advertisement and custom smilies, to name a few. A NY-Times article published in July (about Google Maps) describes Google’s approach to web application development, and how they decide which of their competitors’ features they choose to match, and which ones they ignore. It’s still in beta; simple and not exactly feature-rich, but in many ways it’s already kicking ass.

Part 2 of the Sega Yakuza prequel video is online now. I edited my original post to correct an error, too. I’d previously said that Sega commissioned four different directors to each do a part of the prequel as four separate films (which would have been awesome), but it seems I was wrong. Part 2 has no credits or anything (not to mention the Yakuza site seems to have no visible credits for the film), so it looks like Miike did all four parts himself. Don’t get me wrong, that’s still rad.

The site also offers “High Res” downloads at about 110MB per each of the four parts.

Well, that was fast! Obviously an avid online poker player, Jason Cross has posted an entry in his Modern Geek blog about some issues people are having with the formerly-free Texas Hold’em game. The article describes Jason’s gripes with cheaters, gameplay and UI problems in the game, and reports people getting two of the same card! I still haven’t had a chance to play even a single hand on Xbox Live yet, but I’m already hoping for a quick patch to fix the glitches and exploits. At the same time, of course, I’m not too upset because it was a free download.

Texas Hold’em will appear on retail shelves alongside 5 other XBLA titles in the “Xbox Live Arcade Unplugged” compilation, which I guess was designed for all seven Xbox 360 users without Xbox live.

A reminder to everyone who hasn’t downloaded Texas Hold’em for free from the Xbox Live Marketplace: download it for free while you still can! The promotion ends tonight, and is available in all regions except Japan and Korea.

The game itself seems like a pretty darn good video-gamification of Texas Hold’em. Like most XBLA games, it doesn’t show off any of the 360’s capabilities, but I can see a developer using flashy graphics to justify a higher price (Lumines!). I played for about fifty seconds last night just to try it out, it looks like it might support the Vision camera, or at least gamer pictures.

As for Lumines Live, an article at Gamingbits (which actually just quotes an OXM review) describes the heavily-speculated “extra fees” in the game. It looks like once you beat a certain number of levels in Puzzle/Mission mode and “vs. CPU” mode, you’ll be prompted to buy more levels for 400 and 300 MSP each. This is on top of the 1200 MS Point cost of the game. Before you start whining about it being high for an XBLA game, consider how LOW the cost is for a regular game, which happens to be delivered via XBLM. It’s still cheaper than Lumines II. How much did you pay for Lumines on your PSP when it first came out?

Charging for levels aside, Lumines Live will apparently also have downloadable “Packs” with things like extra music, skins and background videos. You wouldn’t expect a game skin to cost money, but you wouldn’t expect a pack of gamer pictures to cost money either. I’ll probably pony up the dough for Lumines, and probably the extra missions, but I don’t see myself spending money on a Madonna music video. Let’s just be thankful they aren’t included in the base game or worse yet, included in the price.

Washington Post has a story about the possibility of an unmanned version of their F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Remember that movie “STEALTH”? …Neither do I. I’d expect to see more forays into autonomous recon vehicles before we see many robot fighters.

It is imperative that we integrate systematic user effects before we enable embedded communities. Just click the button and get ready to tag your standards-compliant life-hacks. Incidentally, I bet there’s a lot of money in some of these phrases, but the rest are just things for mac users to say to each other while they wait in line at starbucks.

The logo was even done with the Web 2.0 logo generator!

MetrocDream by Russos is a Russian photolog with some awesome pictures. I just wish I could read what the text says…

Stickam rolled out some new features on Monday to take advantage of the popularity of social networking and “web 2.0″ … and by “take advantage of web 2.0″, I don’t just mean create a spammy profile on every website ever. They promote themselves with profiles on friendster, blogger, myspace, (WARNING, link points to myspace) and they even had a spammy wiki article until it got deleted and locked. New features include the ability amass an army of friends and leave comments for them. For those of you unfamiliar with Stickam, it’s a website where you use webcams to chat in real time (which makes leaving comments a bit of a step backwards). So it’s like Myspace only it offers something to do. I’m not a fan of the “add people, update profile, leave comments, add more people and repeat” mechanic, but Paris Hilton thinks it’s hot so it can’t be all bad…. right? The features haven’t been pushed yet at Stickam Japan (beta), not that anyone would notice.

Clogging up the web with bright pink profiles and sparkly animated gifs that say “baby” has given girls something to do online (lol), and more users means more money. You can’t throw a rock online these days without hitting something that’s been influenced by the inevitable explosion of user-generated content. Offenders include Google, Leopard, Vista and even Redhat. Curious.

Sega commissioned four directors to make short films to promote their new game “Yakuza” (known in Japan as “RYÛ GA GOTOKU”). Episode 1 was directed by Takashi Miike (Audition, Dead or Alive) and is availible online now. I don’t know how closely the plots of the films and the game are related. There’s nothing wrong with taking a page out of the BMW-Films playbook when it’s an excellent idea.

The official site has the film viewable in embedded flash, or you can view/download it at GameTrailers at about 70MB for the wmv or quicktime [link]

Interesting fact about the game, it cost US$21 Million according to a Kotaku article posted in May.

UPDATE (Aug 25, 2006): Well it looks like I misunderstood something, I guess it’s just one ~40 minute film divided into 4 parts. It appears all of the parts are done by Miike. My bad!

I remember reading an article back in May, wherein game developers told indie studios to “forget it“, and saying how they had a “zero percent chance of success”

“The barrier to entry in terms of cost, quality required, access to a market… forget it.”

Not long later, we started seeing articles about how the Xbox Live Arcade represented a ray of hope for smaller game studios. It looks like Microsoft plans on upping the ante even more with XNA Game Studio Express, an IDE based on Visual Studio Express and .NET.

Enter: Next-Gen Gaming 2.0?

By joining a “creators club” for an annual subscription fee of $99 (U.S.), users will be able to build, test and share their games on Xbox 360™ and access a wealth of materials to help speed the game development progress.

I couldn’t be more excited. This has huge potential to change the way we think about console games. An affordable, legal and Microsoft-supported way for indie developers to get their projects on the Xbox 360 without modchips. It makes me take a hopeful second look at things like this April forum post from the RakeInGrass boards about developing for XBLA.

Updates:
There’s also some rumbling in the Nintendo community about a similar idea on the Wii. …and ith both competitors doing it, that should be enough to push Sony onto the bandwagon. The future of games is looking damn good this week. Also, I forgot to slyly work in a link to this BBC News article about Game Studio Express. I’ve also found a FAQ about it at MSDN [link].