InsideGoogle @ Digital Life: Google Has some Big Plans

Nathan Weinberg of InsideGoogle is reporting live from Digital Life and has already payed a visit to the Google booth there. Lots of interesting stuff in his post including a test drive of the just unveiled Google Desktop Search.



Outside of some brief conversations with Biz Stone (Blogger) and Orkut Buyukkoten (the namesake of Orkut) something else caught my eye.



The Picasa team let Nathan in on a little known secret, Google actually has an Instant Messenger. It's in Hello, a part of Picasa, and it's pretty powerful, as well as, in their words, 'more secure than AOL's'.

"I'll be checking out that more in the future. They also showed me how Hello integrates with Blogger, and told me why Google bought them."

Come on Nathan, don't leave us hanging like that! ;-)



UPDATE: Nathan has a great follow-up on Picassa & Hello and how they integrate with Blogger, plus the Instant Messaging portion of Hello.