This postThey did it! Finally! Yes, folks, that’s right, Gmail now has group chat. And it’s not even an April fool’s joke. :P
To quote Google:
To start a group chat, click “Group chat” from the “Options” menu when chatting. Enter the names of the people you want to add, and, bingo, you’re in your very own chat room. All the familiar features such as chat archiving and taking the chat off the record still work as well.
Sweet. Oh, man, this totally made my day — it’s like an early Christmas. :)
This has its possibilities…
Online book colloqiua with my students that live at huge distances!
Thanks for the heads up Ben!
Thanks Ben
I posted another comment and hit the send before I proofread.
This has great application for my distance students in holding online book colloquia. Yahoo had group chat and even voice chat a long time ago, about 2002 when I started my online school. Nice to see gmail arrive.
Yahoo had group chat in their e-mail client? Did I miss that somehow? I was under the impression that Google was the first to combine e-mail and chat into a single web-based application.
She must mean the standalone instant messaging client, not the email client.
As I’m sure you know, group chat (or group IM) has been a feature of chat clients (AIM, Yahoo, ICQ) since the late 1990s (I think). At least, I remember using the feature all the time my first year of college (2000).
Google’s innovation here is to place group chat within the email client, as Ben points out. And it’s not so much an innovation as a natural extension of the migration of chat from independent to embedded. For comparison, Yahoo only rolled out chat embedded chat in their email client in March 2007. Google introduced theirs in February 2006.
However, Google is still weird in that they haven’t introduced group chat into Google Talk, their standalone chat client. In this respect, they really *are* nearly a decade behind. Since Google’s all about online programs, I don’t know how quick further development of Google Talk will be (or if they’ll ever create versions for other OSes besides Windows).
Good point. I think there was a time when I used Google Talk, and before that Adium (an IM client for Mac), but for the last year or two I’ve only used Gmail’s embedded client. It’s just more convenient — especially since I often migrate between computers, whether at home or at a lab computer at school. (And I’m a bit OCD about keeping logs of all my chats, so I don’t really want them strewn about on several different computers. Gmail keeps them all in one tidy place, and that’s a huge selling point for me.)
Well, Google Desktop is also a desktop app. But I don’t use that, either. :)
Google Talk stores chat in Gmail just like the integrated version. I’m not sure what all the different features are between the two versions, but the standalone has file transfer, for one thing.
Ah, file transfer. If only they would add that to the embedded version… :)
