Myanmar

Out of the 7,434 people who have completed profiles on GTalk Profile, 209 of them are from Myanmar (also known as Burma). Below is a breakdown of the top five countries in terms of profiles:

India         1,295
China         1,061
United States   946
Myanmar         209
Brazil          191

Over the past year, Myanmar has been the fifth most popular country measured by the number of visitors to GTalk Profile.

There have been no visitors to GTalk Profile from Myanmar since Thursday, September 27th. This is due to an Internet blackout that started last Friday. According to many sources, the human rights issue in Myanmar is quite serious. Yesterday, I searched through profiles of people from Myanmar and invited several people to my friends list. So far, I've managed to talk to two people, both currently in Singapore. While Internet connections are severed, there are some bloggers still managing to write.

For more information about what's going on:

• Human Rights Watch: Asia: Burma
• The Burma Campaign UK
  

Profile Photos and More

If you have been using GTalk Profile for a while you may have recently noticed a few changes. We hope you like them. As always, we welcome your feedback.

One new feature is the ability to see your friends' photos on their profiles. Each profile displays that user's Google Talk/Gmail photo. For privacy reasons, there are some limitations to this functionality. In order to see someone else's photo, you will need to be on each other's GTalk Profile and Google Talk friend lists. You will also need to be logged in to your Gmail account with chat enabled. At this point, browsers that don't support Gmail with chat will show a ghost photo. You can update your own photo to be displayed in either Google Talk or Gmail.

We have started the process of combining the Public and Private friend list. Basically, we have removed the Public friend list from everywhere except your edit profile page. What used to be your Private friend list is now known as simply your "friend list". In the near future these friends will be displayed publicly on your profile page. If you do not want links to these users' profiles to be publicly displayed on your profile, you should remove them from your friend list before we make this change. As always, your friends' Google Talk IDs will still remain hidden to people not on their friend list.

Finally, a small change that our international users will appreciate is a fix to GTalk Profile's character encoding. Non-western languages (such as Chinese) will now display correctly if your browser supports UTF-8 (most modern browsers support UTF-8). We are hatching a plan to make GTalk Profile available in multiple languages. We will be looking for volunteers to help us translate, so if you are fluent in English and at least one other language then stay tuned!

Our Wish List

As a follow up to my last post about GTalk Profile's mention on the Google Talk blog, I'd like to talk about some features that I wish we could add to GTalk Profile. These are features that I think are pretty cool but would require varying levels of integration with Google's services. What do you think of these ideas, are these features you would like to see on GTalk Profile? Comments from any Googlers reading would be greatly appreciated as well!

• Integrated login with Google Accounts. Users could sign in with their Google Account and would not need to register with GTalk Profile when first creating a profile.
• Display the same picture that is used in Google Talk and Gmail on a user's profile page.
• Adding someone to your friends list in GTalk Profile would be the same as adding them as a friend in Google Talk and vice-versa (if they approve your request). Only one list to maintain.
  
• Online status display when viewing users on GTalk Profile who are on your Google Talk friends list.
• A GTalk Profile Google Talk Theme that automatically adds a link in your chat window to the GTalk Profile of the person with whom you are talking. This would require some sort of email or jid field to be available to Google Talk Themes developers.
• Support for xmpp:[email address] hyperlinks that open up Google Talk.
  

Talk About GTalk Profile

GTalk Profile is featured in the latest Google Talk blog entry about a beta release of Google Talk in 13 new languages. One of the things we find most exciting about GTalk Profile is seeing all of the countries from which Google Talk users come. We hope this new release will bring even more people on to Google Talk!

Google Talk XMPP Federation

Google Talk is now connected to the public XMPP network. The announcement was made this morning in the Google Talk Blog. This means that Google Talk users can communicate with anyone on a public Jabber server using "the dialback protocol as described in RFC 3920."

This is an important step in standardizing Instant Messaging in the same way that e-mail has been standardized for years. Imagine if you could only send e-mail to other Gmail users. Or, if you used Hotmail and you could only send e-mail to other Hotmail users. In a few years, I hope we will look back at the now-current state of Instant Messaging and wonder why it took so long to connect all of the Instant Messaging networks together.

By basing Google Talk on the open XMPP standard Google will help make universal Instant Messaging federation a reality. The connection of Google Talk to the public XMPP network today brings us one step closer to this goal. Google has announced plans to connect Google Talk to AIM. It will be interesting to see if AIM also adopts the XMPP standard.

Yahoo! and MSN are connecting their Instant Messaging networks together. It will be tough to convince Yahoo! and Microsoft that opening up their Instant Messaging networks will be in their best interests. Right now they have a very large combined user base. However, every new person that signs up on Google Talk or another service on the XMPP network gives Yahoo! and MSN one more reason to open up their network. They cannot continue to survive as a closed-off network while an open network flourishes around them.

Buddy Icons in Google Talk?

Customize Talk has an article about an unreleased version of Google Talk that was demoed at the recent Consumer Electronics Show. The article has several pictures showing various "buddy icons" in Google Talk. There is also word that the Google Talk/AIM integration will be released soon.

New Year, New Features

We'd like to wish everyone a happy new year! Our recent updates were very successful (other than a minor DNS glitch). Some questions have come up in regards to the new Google Map. There are a few known bugs we are working on fixing.

One new feature, just added today, is the ability to get RSS feeds of profiles. Two feeds are currently available: 10 newly added profiles and 10 newly added/edited profiles. Want to see more customizable feeds? Let us know in the GTalk Profile Google Group.