NOTE: Many of the claims made in the item below have been questioned by Russell Shaw. See the full story here.

It's ironic, but my first invitation to use Google Talk came from Pakistan. From Karachi, actually.

Specifically it was from a long-time online friend named Tariq Mustafa (known as Tee Emm), who works in the high-tech sector there.

I am really excited on this Google IM thing (and so would be tens of millions of users very soon). I think I was ahead of you just because of the time-zone difference. Anyway, here is the summary I wanted to share with you of the excitement.

Why the excitement? IM has been around for ages.

The excitement is because this isn't really IM. Or it's not just IM. It's VOIP, integrated from the start with IM.

What this does is absolutely kill international long distance in a way Skype only dreamt of. I'm actually a naive user, but I was able to download, and load, a VOIP client (with IM) in less than a minute.

So can anyone else, anywhere else.

More from Tariq after the break.

a. It's coming from Google - so one can expect a very neat and logical interface of the service if not now, at least in the coming days (its still beta). But Google has always done an excellent job for putting the best interface to everything that they've touched till now.

b. The underlying protocol is Jabber - something that is considered as
the Robinhood of Messenger services. I wrote about this in 2003

c. It is supporting SIP to darling of the newage VoIP services. Despite all the support that SIP enjoys today in the VoIP and the Internet world, we all still needed a giant like Google to put its weight behind SIP to have this protocol formally declared as the VoIP winner protocol. With this happening, I see a major contribution from Google towards putting a lot many things in the VoIP world straight. No wonder if we see a large number of vendors and schools of thoughts following the SIP way that they might have todate avoided. Inline with their 'Do No Evil' principal, Google has avoided a propriatary voip protocol (like Skype) which to me is a cool thing and thumbs up to
google for this.

Make that two thumbs up.