Gmail gets Google Talk

pcpro.co.uk
Tuesday 7th February 2006
Gmail gets Google Talk 4:11PM

In a bid to unseat the giants of the instant messaging world, Google has begun integrating its recently released chat client into its hugely popular Gmail service.

Gmail users will be able to access the chat interface at the bottom of the email window or open up into a new window. The Gmail interface has further been altered to provide a list of Quick Contacts on the left-hand side, which is synchronised with the user's Google Talk Friends list.

A coloured ball shows the online status of each contact.

Chats will be automatically archived to the Gmail account where they are listed in a separate 'mailbox' and are easily searched. Archiving can be disabled across the board or on-the-fly through the 'off the record' setting. If this is activated then both parties are warned that no record is being stored by Google, although it doesn't stop either party from simply copying the text and pasting it elsewhere.

Google Talk was released last August and last month Google announced that it was opening up the software to any other IM client or application that supports the Jabber/XMPP protocol.

For more information go to www.google.com/talk and http://mail.google.com.

Source here