Google Talk in Gmail
Originally I thought this was just an interesting novelty, but turns out it’s actually quite useful.
If you haven’t seen it, Gmail now has a bar at the left side of the window, next to your mail, where it will show you your Google Talk contacts and their online status. I’ve included a snapshot of it.
What it’s really useful for is those situations where XMPP doesn’t work – where the regular Google Talk client can’t talk to the server because there’s a firewall in the way. The in-browser version uses AJAX technology so it works great when the standalone version can’t.
This has been done before – MSN’s web-based version of MSN Messenger is a much better IM client than the Gmail based Google Talk interface, and it’s available to everyone today. I think the Google Chat interface in Gmail is following the staggered rollout scheme that Google’s been using for their new products.
March 4th, 2006 at 9:05 am
I think MSN and Gtalk integrated into Gmail are very different concepts, the MSN solution is just a limited copy of what’s available in the full client and it always reminds you of this, and in this game web versions of yahoo and aim messenger came before.
The Gtalk approach is to have webchat functionality for people who are more into mail than chat.
Most of all, the big plus is the possibility to save chat transcripts remotely whitin Gmail storage and search them.