I use the GTalk Jabber network via Adium and I’ve been very happy with it, especially since they turned on federation. And I practically live in Gmail. I should be the GChat target audience. So initial impressions.

Unresponsive

It slows down Gmail. And that isn’t good because I already spend way too much time waiting for Gmail. Some of this will be corrected with time, but loading time is noticeably slower, and it feels like day to day operations have taken a performance hit as well.

Slow Delivery

I’ve had at least two messages take 30-40 minutes to arrive. Presumably this is just launched hiccups.

Cluttered

I’ve got a 12in screen, and when the chat dialogs are up Gmail starts to feel claustrophobic. This goes double when I pause for a moment, and the chat enticement dialog pops up.

Unencrypted

Gaim and OTR (and by extension Adium) mean that for the first time its trivial to have decent privacy in your messaging, practically for free. I’m not ready to give that up, and I can’t see GChat adding it.