I downloaded GoogleTalk (www.google.com/talk) last night and did some experimenting. I am very impressed. The VoIP function is one of the more impressive aspects about it mainly because it seems to have some rather intelligent networking algorithms within it. I’ll explain. I setup GoogleTalk on my laptop as well as one of my servers just to test out its functionality. I then called my server from my laptop and when I picked up the call on my server, it connected through my local area network instead of proxying through the internet to google’s server and then back to my server. In addition, today when I connected to my home network via my VPN connection from a remote location, I performed the same action (calling my server from my laptop) and it even connected through the VPN tunnel! For those of you that don’t understand why this is important, basically an entire voice conversation can be encrypted, meaning if someone wants to snoop my connection to possibly listen in on my communication, all the data is scrambled. The program seems to work about 10x better than AIM or MSN and the install is super-smooth. Pretty sweet …