Techie blogger Nugget thinks that Google are walking away from a chance to open up instant messaging in the same way as SMTP opened up the world of email by disallowing users of their Google Talk service access to the world’s Jabber servers.

All Google has done is create yet another closed-loop system. They’ve made it just a little bit more of a burden for people to reliably have IM connectivity to all their friends. They’ve made it a little bit harder for people to communicate. They’ve made it a lot harder for the overall state of instant messaging to progress.

His comparisons, or not as the case may be, with the state of email 10 or 15 years ago, make a lot of sense. All I hope is that Google sees sense and incorporates it in the future, perhaps when they take the ‘beta’ seal off of it.

Have a read if you’re interested.

On Google Talk, I apparently talk a lot (cheers to Oishii)

Here’s where I become Mr. Nitpicky again, because I love stuff like this.

It’s beck and call, not beckon call, schitzophrenic does NOT mean split personalities, it means split from reality, and Xmas isn’t an attempt to remove Christ from Christmas, X is the Greek letter for chi.

Study up, so that you can always be right in those grammatical arguments.

Common Errors in English

Matt Campbell and friends decided to find out the answer to that very question, and last week managed to try it out for real, by putting a tiny camcorder in a model rocket, looking down at Earth.

The results are rather nice - shooting away from Earth, you don’t expect the speed to be quite that.. well, speedy.

Campbell has posted videos of their exploits on the Camcorder Rocket Project homepage, where you can also read about events leading up to the tests. The group also had a second day of launches just two days ago.

The project was also the ‘Video of the Week’ on CamcorderInfo.com, where there’s also an interview with Mr Campbell.

Interesting? Sure. Crazy? Definitely.

CVS Camcorder Rocket Project (cheers to Make Blog)