I’ve been a faithful user of Gmail for a little over 2 years now and one of the things I never really used was the built-in chat since most people use AIM to chat. The Gmail team released a new feature today that allows you to login to your AIM account and have your buddies show up in the “chat” list with your other Gmail contacts. I haven’t been much of a chatter for a while and I even went through today and purged my buddy list of over 50 screen names.
The integration with Gmail is a little primitive (as is Gmail’s chat), but it works great for the amount of chatting I do. The one feature that I would love to see is the ability to map AIM screen names to Gmail contacts so they don’t show up twice in the chat list. That would be uber-slick. If you use Gmail try it out, hit the options button on the bottom left of the chat list.
They just keep winning! Since gmail’s IMAP access was released I find I don’t use the browser for gmail anymore.
I tried it out. It’s pretty cool actually, but my list of buddies is rather long and scrolling to see all of them is a bit cumbersome. I usually have an instance of pidgin docked on the right side of my screen.