If you don't think Google Talk matters, you're wrong. You might be interested in checking out the prediction market experiment being run by Yahoo and O'Reilly. It uses the same "intelligence of crowds" theory popularized by James Surowieki in his book The Wisdom of Crowds.
Prediction markets work similarly to stock markets, but work on trends. The goal is to predict the future value of a "thing" -- an idea, a product, a service -- whatever.
When you look at the
current chart for the IM market, you'll see that Google Talk is currently doing better than all of the other IM programs.
Of course, predictive markets are just that -- predictive. They are not absolute, and anything can happen. But it is a measure of how seriously people are taking Google Talk and you can bet that AOL, MSN and Yahoo are all concerned about what Google will do.