Google has an instant message service called Google Talk that’s incredibly basic. It works like the same IM services you used to use back in the 90s, by that I mean you need a username and password to get the thing to work.

You also need to give people your email address in order to talk to them.

These days, people prefer using clients like WhatsApp or LINE. They have the same basic IM functionality as Google Talk, but they’re tied to your phone number. So say you install WhatsApp on your phone. It asks you if it can read your address book. You click yes, and then the first time you open the app you immediately see friends of yours who are also using the service.

Rumor has it that Google is going to give Google Talk a makeover at Google I/O next month. They’re going to rebrand the service Babel, and it’s going to combine various Google properties, namely Google Talk, Google Hangouts, and Google Voice.

Thanks to TechRadar, the internet now has a basic idea of what Babel is going to look like. Unsurprisingly, it looks like an IM client. Like I said earlier, we’ll likely find out everything there is to know about Babel in just a few weeks. I have a hard time believing Google is going to unseat WhatsApp, but let’s see what happens. (https://www.whitestallion.com/)