A majority of instant-messaging traffic is considered peer to peer, where messages flow only from one person to another, but there is a definite need for chat rooms. Other IM clients have sought to tackle the problem of allowing more than two people to chat simultaneously in a variety of ways. Unfortunately, at this time, Google Talk does not. There are extremely talented programmers from across the world who have tried their hand at rectifying this problem, though.

To make up for the lack of a group chat feature, one New Zealand programmer who goes by the name of Isomer has designed a Google Talk bot made specifically to operate as a chat room bot. His free Google Talk Conference Bot, known as confbot, is open source and can be downloaded from http://coders.meta.net.nz/~perry/jabber/confbot.php. The bot was written using the Python language, so an interpreter (www.python.org) must be installed onto your computer to run the application. Although the bot designed for Linux, it can be run under a Windows environment as long as the Windows Python interpreter is installed.

To use the conference bot you must first create a unique Google Talk account for it. This can be done by simply creating a throw-away e-mail address and sending a Gmail invite to it. The conference bot application must be placed onto an Internet-accessible computer with an installed Python interpreter, preferably a shell server from a Web host.

To run the conference bot, you simply need to run...