WTH Google
Okay trying to get GoogleTalk to work and kept getting the "You are not registered to use please activate it" message. The forums informed me this was because I didn't have a Google Mail account. So I sign up for one and annoyingly I can't have FlipC as the name has to be a certain number of characters long, so I pick something similar. GoogleTalk now works.
However as I'm in the UK this isn't a gmail.com it's a googlemail.com address and it now has it placed as my default email address. I can still sign in with the old one but it displays the new one, except somehow when I head to Blogger it thinks it's a gmail account. Then all my blog entries didn't show up on my page. They were still there just not showing.
It appears Google hasn't yet caught on to the fact that a) not everyone has a gmail.com account and b) not everyone who uses GoogleTalk wants one.
So I've deleted my GoogleMail account and amusingly as mentioned in the forums GoogleTalk still works with my original email details.
Okay it's all free and still carries Beta tags in places, but some of this is so obvious you wonder how anyone could miss it?
3 comments:
The obvious answer is not to bother. GoogleTalk is just a web-based Jabber (also known as XMPP) client that's locked to their Jabber service. Jabber is an open protocol, so there are many clients available (Pidgin is quite a good one for Windows, Linux, and Mac); and it's distributed, so there are many servers available for you to register an account with. Most of them won't require you to also sign up for email as well. Registering on any Jabber server allows you to talk to people on any other Jabber server, including GoogleTalk.
The only shortcoming is that GoogleTalk's multi-user chat (that is, IRC-like rather than IM-like) uses some closed protocol that's completely incompatible with everything else.
It just seemed the obvious solution given that I already use Blogger with their Analytics, and have an iGoogle home page.
Thanks a lot! You really helped me out with this one. The little star did the trick for Internet Drama 7!!
Grtz
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