March 8th, 2007
Signs of an embeddable Google Talk client coming?
There is another brand new entry into Google's robots.txt file — it's difficult to know why it's there, but I'll give it a shot. The new entry disallows robots from crawling the "/cricket" directory. But what is "cricket"?
Cricket is the codename for Google Talk according to several sources — including Andrew Girdwood, someone who seems to have contacts inside (or at least who have left) Google. The question is, why would they need to create this entry in the robots file?
I'll give it a shot, but I warn you this is purely speculation and shouldn't be taken for anything other than that. Maybe they are creating an embeddable Google Talk client for your website — direct access to you if you are online. I would assume you would need to be logged into your Google Account and on the person's contact list in order to communicate — or maybe that would be optional?
Do you have any other ideas why they would add this to their robots.txt file?
Update:
Or, more likely, it could simply be for a "cricket" gadget.
Garett Rogers is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the wireless industry.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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