I was using MSN and thinking “that advertisement for The Sun is insulting, but it doesn’t bother me”. That got me thinking, would I be bothered if Google Talk had adverts? The problem is that the reason the MSN ads don’t bother me is most likely because they’ve always been there and now I have ad-blindness for them, but either way I thought I’d see what it’d look like with Google Talk having ads.

Here’s how a normal conversation looks at the moment:

Gtalk normal chat window

Here’s how I’d figure it’d look with adverts. I decided that, since Google already has a huge ad infrastructure with thousands of clients, they’d definitely go with AdSense and make it contextual to your conversation.

Google Talk with adverts

Obviously, it’d look much nicer if Google did it.

Some people may be a bit worried about it being contextual with Google “reading” there conversations, but it’s really only the same as they do with the adverts in Gmail. It’s not like there’s a human reading and picking which advert for each conversation.

Also, like I said in that image, it’d be annoying and would slow down the lightweightness of the chat if the adverts updated every few seconds. In that image I said maybe every ten minutes it could update, but I’d expect it to be around half an hour, to be honest.

Plus, I’d only want the adverts to be useful. It’s annoying when you search for “telnet help” and the ads are “Get your telnet help from Ebay!”.

I’d only want the URL (so I know where I’m going) and the name for the link on the window, because the description would really just be too long. Even in my example, I’d say that two lines would be pushing it. I like Gtalk because it’s not bulky like MSN has gotten (take a look at an MSN conversation and see how much wasted whitespace there is).

Doesn’t just have to be adverts either, Google could chuck in a few info boxes. If someone mentions an address, the box could change to a link to the Google Map for it.

Of course, I don’t want them going over board with this. I hate how MSN added the search functionality to chat. And so long as the ads were below the textbox and not above it I’d be happy.