A couple of days ago I noticed quiet talk about the integration of Gmail and Gtalk. Gtalk is Google's effort at VoIP. For the most part, it's an unspectacular fizzle. This appears to be an attempt rejuvenate something that never gained that much traction in the first place. But they'll tell you it's VoIP, so I think we should mention it. On the condition that any time you digitize and packetize an analog voice signal and ship it via IP, we'll that's VoIP. There's a chasm between VoIP and IP Telephony that's hidden in the fog of how vendors and providers talk about it today.

In this morning's blogs, the first one I see is Jeff Pulver, who neatly sums it up in The Presence of Gmail. For Jeff it's about the convenience of seeing which contacts are online and able chat within Gmail. More about presence than anything else.

While I always thought that Presence + Location was a powerful combination, it turns out that Presence + email plays a very interesting role as well.

I wonder how long it will take for a similar feature set to appear on Y!, MSN and AOL?

I am looking forward to the time when the Presence + email platforms of these portals are all interconnected and I no longer need to use a separate dedicated application to engage in on-line chats amongst my friends.

Presence is becoming more and more crucial to business on the net.

While Jeff was playing with this new feature, he reached out and tagged Alec Saunders who wrote about it in GMail and Hotmail Do Presence

Alec ran off to MSN to check out how their option works and did a nice short comparison.

It seems clear that both companies are looking at IM and EMail as being two sides of the same coin. Google has the upper hand in terms of integration, in my opinion. The fact that all my GTalk threads get stored in the mail system makes a ton of sense. But Microsoft has a nicer user experience, in my opinion.

I'm going to offer up another observation. As we work toward integration or convergence of what we're now calling presence, there are a lot of tools and choices. Gmail/GoogleTalk, MSN, Yahoo, AIM, Skype, Gizmo, Sightspeed, and a host of others I don't have the time or inclination to thoroughly test. Every one of these is, in some sense, a walled garden. Some are closed unless your contacts join the same service. Some use proprietary protocols. There's precious little collaboration, cooperation and teamwork between any of them to give us users the experience we're looking for.

Somewhere there's a sleeper that's going to leave most of these in the dust. Who do you think the sleeper is?