How to Make Free Conference Calls with GTalk

Google’s instant messenger is known as GTalk which is gaining popularity day by day due to its lightweight, less resource killer and stunning voice chat quality but Google’s IM team missed an important and most often used feature which is Conference Calling. Yahoo and Msn messengers are widely used due to free conference calling.

Here, I will share a tip/hack to make free conference call and I am sure you’ll love to try this method. In order to make conference calls in gtalk, you need to launch multiple instances of gTalk (yes, it is possible).
Steps to make multiple instances of gTalk

* Make a copy of gTalk shortcut icon on your desktop
* Right click the shortcut and click on properties in contextual menu
* In the target text box, change “C:\Program Files\Google\Google Talk\googletalk.exe” /startmenu to “C:\Program Files\Google\Google Talk\googletalk.exe” /nomutex
* Click on OK and you are done
* Now you can launch multiple copies of gTalk by clicking the gtalk shortcut icon

Making Conference calls

Lets say that 3 persons (A, B & C) want to make conference call with each other, here’s how they will connect with each other.

All of them have to enable multi-session google talk IM clients and launch two copies of Gtalk on their computers. If person A makes a voice call to person B and person B makes a call to person C and person C makes a call to person A then they are connected to each other in conference call. They all can interact and communicate with each other.

Popularity: 4%

Facebook user base is exponentially growing. For the month of May, Compete (www.compete.com), a web analytics company, produced data that shows the number of people visiting facebook from US has tremendously increased to 82.9 million. On top of it, 65 million unique visitors were generated by services or websites running on a platform which is known as Facebook Connect. This brings the total to 113 million facebook user visits from US alone. The traffic on MySpace is on the decline and surprisingly the growth of twitter has come to a halt.

Not only is facebook leading the marathon of social networks, internet giants such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo! who earlier competed among themselves have now got a new entrant staring them in the face to break their competition triad existing for so many years. Facebook in just 3 years has gotten to the level that took others approximately a decade to reach.

Though it seems unfair to compare facebook with the other web giants as they all are aimed at different goals and groups of users but there is no denying to the pervasive influence of facebook in our routine lives. People are already relying more on it to use it as a communication medium than any other tool. The surge in the popularity of the facebook has resulted in it being an ultimate destination for social networking.

Facebook raised a lot venture capital. In fact, the amount of money it raised is greater than the funding got by any of the popular social and professional networking sites. The current valuation of facebook stands at $16 billion. There is a generally held belief that facebook, though, has a large number of registered users, but the high-value users from Japan, UK and US registered with facebook are still not more than other social networking services such as MySpace; meaning MySpace even today is more valuable than facebook. This argument seems valid but keeping in view the steep growth of facebook users, one can easily imagine how far this service can go in the years to come.

Looking at some figures from Compete.com, Google, Yahoo and MSN got 145.5 million, 135.5 million and 97.5 million unique visitors. As mentioned earlier, facebook is reported to have received 113 million unique visits which means it has already taken the lead on MSN and is swiftly approaching the next two.

Those days are not too far when facebook will become the ultimate choice of people who want to socialize, bond and network. No wonder this facebook is well on a path to become a household service!

Popularity: 21%