GTalk Profile provides the perfect solution to this problem. Using Google Maps, GTalk Profile allows users to plot where they are on a map and also find other users around the world. Simply type your city and state into the search box and GTalk Profile will provide you with a list of users near you along with a description of each user.

Clicking on a name takes you to a profile page where you’ll find a longer description, photos, interests, location, and the option to request a user’s Google Talk information. Sign Up for GTalk Profile Currently the most active countries seem to be Europe, Africa and South America. The United States is the least active country on GTalk Profile. Hopefully that will change soon.

GTalk Profile is a great way to expand your Google contacts, though we’d be careful about accepting any and every request on this service. Copyright 2008 ReadWriteWeb. All Rights Reserved.

has been widely criticised for its role in helping the Chinese government identify Shi Tao, a reporter accused of leaking state secrets abroad. He was jailed for 10 years in April 2007. Google Inc., which has the corporate motto Don’t be evil, upset some by launching a self-censoring Chinese site. TOM said only that the company adhered to Chinese rules and regulations, and declined to answer any further questions. Their defence was mocked by the people they aimed to monitor.

We must interrogate you: the constitution stipulates that citizens have freedom of correspondence and of secret correspondence. Have you complied with this mother of laws? one post on an online message board asked. Author Wang said government controls on phones and other Internet programs left him with little choice but to take Skype at its word and continue using its original software, but even that has a security flaw that he worries about constantly.

He says the program allows one user to open their account on two separate computers, with no notification to the first. If our password is stolen, everything that we do on Skype can be seen or copied on another computer without us knowing. And in fact stealing a password is very easy for Internet police or hackers, he added.

By its very nature, Skype is difficult to wiretap. Skype routes calls and chats between computers over the Internet, avoiding traditional phone networks. And the contents are supposedly encrypted, raising concerns in law enforcement that Skype could let criminals communicate without fear of eavesdropping. The FBI has argued for applying U.S. wiretapping law to Internet phone calls.

The bureau got a favorable court ruling in 2006, but it’s not clear whether it applies to systems like Skype that skip telephone networks. In the other camp, privacy advocates and security experts are concerned that Skype, while presented by the company as a secure channel of communication, has some kind of “back door” that allows eavesdropping. Whether Skypetapping is already going on in the U.S. and Europe is a matter that the company has equivocated on for years.

“For a couple of years, maybe more, people have had the suspicion . . . that Skype pretends to be secure but actually isn’t,” said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer of BT Group PLC, the British telecom carrier. “The Chinese eavesdropping on Skype text messages only adds to the PR problems, the image problems, that Skype has among those who care about security,” Schneier added.

“With the acquisition of Jabber, we will be able to extend the reach of our current instant messaging service and expand the capabilities of our collaboration platform,” said Doug Dennerlune, senior vice president of Cisco’s collaboration software group. “Our intention is to be the interoperability benchmark in the collaboration space.” Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company hopes to complete the transaction by the end of its second fiscal quarter in January.

“With the acquisition of Jabber, we will be able to extend the reach of our current instant messaging service and expand the capabilities of our collaboration platform,” Doug Dennerline, senior vice president of Cisco s Collaboration Software Group, said in a statement. Cisco said it expects the deal to close by the end of January. (Reporting by Tiffany Wu; Editing by Steve Orlofsky) ?? 2008 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved.

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It lets users of a given site chat with friends on that site. It also lets them chat with friends on the major IM providers that Meebo integrates, including AOL s AIM, Google s Gtalk, Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger. Partner sites can customize the chat interface to their wishes. Meebo has built CommunityIM using the Jabber IM standard, which will also allow the company to connect users on various partner sites, and on Jabber-supported third-party applications.

The total number of monthly users on these partner sites now adds up to 72.9 million worldwide, according to August comScore traffic numbers cited by the company. The CommunityIM service itself will roll out in stages later this fall. Meebo, along with social networks like Facebook, has become iconic to pundits who like to criticize web companies with millions of users but no apparently significant revenue streams.

Meebo raised $25 million earlier this year, to help tide it over as it figures revenue out. On that front, it has been testing an advertising service it calls SparkAds, where multimedia ads run within parts of the Meebo IM interface. CommunityIM partner sites can run these ads, and split revenue from them with Meebo. The screenshot below shows how CommunityIM can be integrated into Friendfeed (Friendfeed isn t actually a partner, what you see is just a demo mockup).

Tonight, they are adding a few more partners to that mix, and with it, claiming that in total they will reach ‘њ7.6 percent of global Internet users’ќ with the new platform ‘“ about 72.9 unique users globally each month according to comScore.

The interesting aspect of Community IM is that for sites that integrate it, users will be able to converse both on the host site and on Meebo.com, the company’s main web-based chat service that also allows users to simultaneously access accounts on AIM, Yahoo, and MSN. Additionally, partners - which now also include Nickelodeon, PerfSport, and Tagged - get a share of the revenue generated through advertising within the IM and chatrooms that Meebo provides.

Meebo is certainly not alone in the private label IM space. Userplane offers a popular and easy to install IM product for publishers, and has partners like KickApps that distribute it to hundreds of niche social networks around the Web. However, what’s unique about Meebo’s offering is that they also offer a popular destination site, in turn enabling users to maintain one identity that they can carry with them to popular sites like Flixster and also access via Meebo.com.

One of the world’s most popular web and mobile IM sites, eBuddy enables more than 16M monthly global visitors with AIM, Facebook, GoogleTalk, ICQ, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo! IM accounts to chat free of charge in one aggregated interface without having to download or install any application. eBuddy’s mobile IM service - http://m.ebuddy.com ‘“ supports more than 650 different mobile devices and has been downloaded more than 7M times since its June 2007 launch.

‘њInstant messaging is the medium of choice for young people around the world, comments eBuddy’s VP of Worldwide Sales, Rogier van den Heuvel.

‘њeBuddy currently processes over 3.7 billion messages per month, and we provide a unique opportunity and platform for advertisers to reach these influential users who replicate advertising messages to their friends while communicating on eBuddy.’ќ Apart from various advertising spaces in each of the individual chat-boxes for all of eBuddy’s web-based IM applications, eBuddy also offers advertising space access on Sony PSP, Nintendo DS, plus mobile phone content for specific mobile networks.