Google Hires Lead Gaim Developer

By Nate Mook | Published October 13, 2005, 7:11 PM

Mozilla's Firefox developers aren't the only open source programmers migrating to the GooglePlex. Gaim lead Sean Egan announced Wednesday that he had taken a position at the search giant to help build Google Talk. Egan's current project is to make other IM clients compatible with Google's voice calling feature.

Egan will continue his work on Gaim, which is currently nearing its 2.0 release. Voice compatibility with Google Talk and support for the webcam features in MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger are on the list of new features. "We're looking to feature freeze at the end of this month and release a month or so later, so be sure to get on our cases and make sure we get it finished," Egan wrote on the Gaim project site.

Comments

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i never liked that guy, and he has a poor way of understanding the complaints
including him means loads of security holes
agree or not, but this is not good !

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I think this is a brilliant idea as Gaim is a well established and respected product that suffers from being open-source and non-funded. As Google allows their developers to use a portion of their work-time for their own projects and Egan's pet project is so closely related to his Google Project, I can see both GoogleTalk and Gaim development increasing exponentially. This is wonderful news! I've switched from Trillian to Gaim and back again... always tempted to jump back to Gaim as I enjoy following OpenSource development (and Gaim is much lower on resources -- just not a big fan of GTK)...

I also respect Google for hiring from the Gaim project -- if they were looking to hire this sort of talent, their other choices were to hire from MirandaIM and/or Trillian. I think Google made a good choice in hiring based on development philosophy. =)

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Gaim rocks and so does Google. So its a great relationship!

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They need to improve:
1. add VOIP so we can call to landline with cheap.
2. Better Interoperability to others such as ICQ, Yahoo and MSN.
3. Add Video Chat. which can be customized or smart setting for dialup and adsl users
4. dont make the resources use too big.

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Well....I'll not be using GAIM anymore.

Anything Google touches becomes tainted.

Google sucks.

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I must have missed where in the article it said that GOOGLE would be developing for gaim. Yes, sean works for google now, but he is still lead gaim dev. All he will be doing, re: google talk's functionality with gaim, is trying to better incorporate its functionality into the client, which is what gaims sole point is now (A unified application to work with all different types of instant messaging programs). Am I wrong or does it sound like you just hate google because they are trying to expand their reach in the market?

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No wait...that's Microsoft sucks! Get with the program, dude! ;o)

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Have you missed his other 3000 posts in every topic involving goolge? It's always the same. Google is big=Google sucks.

Just ignore it.

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TROLL! =)

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Good to see that he will be able to better incorporate google talk features into gaim. Now if only all of the IM server dev's would get it so we could exchange IM's with users regardless of the service they use. A unified network would be awesome!

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Well MSN and Yahoo will be there next year. Hopefully, it won't take too long for AIM to follow.

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Yeah, what we need is to get AIM/ICQ/MSN/YAHOO all interoperating and then add in google talk. Get the MAJOR players in first.

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SWEET!

Today is a good day =D

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