I got an ivite to the Google Talk Beta from the man behind Blogging about Incredible Blogs himself, Ken Leebow. I had commented on another of his posts regarding del.icio.us (which rocks) and he was nice enough to extend an invite to Google Talk just because. Thanks, Ken!

Here are my quick impressions on the beta service:

  1. Quick installation. Always a plus.
  2. Tight integration with Gmail. You get an email notification/alert app and all your Gmail contacts are automatically imported.
  3. None of your other IM contacts are auto-imported, which is a downer, since I’m using Trillian to manage a ton of contacts.
  4. I’ll give you an update on the phone side of things when I actually make a call.
  5. No video. MSN & Yahoo! have it, so can Google be far behind?
  6. The app just looks nice. Very Mac OSX - all rounded edges and transparency.

Download Squad has a full review, for those of you who won’t take my word for it.

There you go. Beg for invites if you want to be a cool (and needy) kid.

UPDATE: It’s an open Beta. D’oh!

UPDATE II: Announcement on the official Google Blog