A new web-based client named Gtalkr has been released just yesterday which gives you the ability to use Google Talk through any browser, anywhere. I talked about meebo a while back, but what is different about the two is that Gtalkr is only for Google Talk, uses Flash instead of Ajax, and also has some great features such as searching and extentions. I think it was a wise decision to go Flash based as there wouldn’t be the browser compatibility issues with Javascript, but just requires one to have Flash installed. If you have Flash and you have a Gmail account, simply go to Gtalkr and login. You will then see a page similar to the below.

The interface is a clean, has lots of gradients, but in my opinion is a little cluttered looking. You will see your contact list on the left. You can see online and offline contacts, search through them, and even invite anyone to get a Gmail account and use Gtalkr. On the right you will see collapsible areas for recently received email, invitations, and an extension area which allows you to view Yahoo Maps (Yes, Yahoo Maps on a Google client), create Todo Lists, buddy signon notifications, and you can even use the Gtalkr API to create your own. There is also a great feature called, Chat Inbox, which allows you to search through any conversation that you have had using Gtalkr. It does store your conversations, but as Om Malik has pointed out, it shouldn’t worry you too much as most clients do this as well. There are also some additional features to help you with your searching, such as filtering by contact name, adding of labels to conversations and even starring conversation to show importance.

If you use Google Talk, you will see some additional features to the conversation windows. At default, the window will appear the same as Google Talk and you have to go to the menu of a conversation window to add the extras. When you open the menu, you will see that you can now view timestamps and also enable the text editor. Enabling the text editor will add buttons for selecting bold, italic, underline, a font from your system, font size, and lastly color. When I mentioned the searching features, I said that you can label conversations and star them. You will see this on the top left, on the side of the menu button. Clicking on the star will star the conversation and clicking on add label will allow you to add labels. Now when you go into the Chat Inbox, you can select tags to refine your searhing.

Overall, Gtalkr seems to work great, athough I did have some problem logging in at first on my computer, but got in after a few tries. I also tried logging on my brothers Macintosh using Safari and we could not login. We then tried in Firefox on Mac and it worked, yet I wasn’t receiving any messages that he was sending to me. I also had one problem with one of the extensions, the Buddy Pounce. The Buddy Pounce allows you to add contacts to a list so you get notified when they signon. Seemed to work except it didn’t work when I would try to remove a contact from the list. Other then those few issues though, everything seemed to work great. It will be interesting to see how Gtalkr makes out. I’m anxious to see what kind of extensions users are going to create using the Extension API.

View Gtalkr - Web-based Google Talk.

Update: Wes from Gtalkr has informed me that they have fixed the connection problems I have been experiencing. They were having some issues with the Google Talk servers, but it is all settled now and seems to work great. Enjoy!