Google Talk Buddy List AWOL

So today I signed in to Google Talk as I do every morning, only to find that my entire buddy list had vanished. Completely gone. I logged out, and signed back in again, but it still wasn’t there. It wasn’t even as though it just so happened that everyone else was offline – I viewed offline names and there was still nothing there. Upon further investigation, I discovered that I am showing up on other’s lists as “Invited”, but having not yet accepted the invitation to join GTalk.

This has evidently happened to quite a few other people in the past few months. I think it’s ridiculous that such a problem can exist and not have been addressed. Am I going to wake up one morning and discover that everything in my GMail account has disappeared too?

What’s worse is that there’s no easy way to contact Google about the problem. I’m still looking, and in the meantime have sent an email to every address I can find.

Tags: google, googletalk, gtalk, jabber