Gmail users can now use AOL’s popular instant-messaging program in addition to Google’s own Gmail Chat…
Gmail and Google Talk users can now chat with their AOL Instant Messenger buddies through the Gmail interface, Google announced on Tuesday.
“Now, you can just log into Gmail and in addition to chatting with fellow Google Talk users through Gmail, you can log into AIM separately and see your AIM friends interspersed with your Google Talk friends.”
“Google engineer Michael Davidson noted the integration today on the Official Gmail Blog.”
Rolling out to all English-based users by the end of the day, the new feature will let you seamlessly jump from chatting with a Google contact to an AIM buddy without having to use two separate chat clients. AIM access will be available on other language versions of Gmail soon, the company said.
Gmail has had its own chat service since February 2006, but now Gmail users will be able to connect to AIM through a drop-down menu on the Gmail Web page, Google said.
The AIM integration feels native to Gmail. The AIM log-in panel is behind the “Set status here” upside-down triangle under the Contacts list. Click there, and if the feature rollout has hit your account, you will see a “Sign into AIM” option on the drop-down menu with AIM’s yellow running man icon next to it.
“A new window opens when you choose to sign in, so be sure that you do not have a pop-up blocker enabled for Gmail.com.”
“AIM in Gmail remembers your password, so logging in is a cinch.”
Once you have entered your AIM log-in information, your AIM buddies will appear in the Contacts list, mixed in with Google Chat contacts, and you can select an AIM contact and chat with them directly.
Click on the “Set status here” triangle again, and you will notice the AIM login option has changed to a logout. Once you have logged out, your AIM contacts disappear, although the next time you log in you would not need to re-enter your password. To use a different AIM account, you need to go to the Chat tab under Settings.
“We are always looking for new and useful ways to help our users connect with friends, family, and coworkers,” Google said in a statement.
It is unclear if or when this cross platform interoperability will come to the stand alone Google Talk client. But for now, it is the first step in bridging two of the biggest instant messaging services.
It also sets up a little face-off with the combined forces of Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger which enabled interoperability between their two IM services last year. Increasingly, IM providers are looking at instant messaging as another way to engage their users and keep them in their little world. Windows Live, for example, allows users to play games together over IM.
One of the features that Gmail has touted, which has become more common among other providers recently, is the ability to use the Gmail chat service from within the Gmail web-portal.
While usually people using AIM are relying on a standalone client of sorts, for people who travel a lot or go from machine to machine they might find it very useful. Some Gmail-specific features, like organizing chats into conversation threads, are brought along with this addition.
There are certain disadvantages, such as needing to re-enter your password every once in a while (though not on every login attempt), but for someone who may not have access to an AIM client it could prove to be very handy.
“Gmail’s label colors make them easier to read.”
This integration comes right on the heels of Google Chat rolling out group chats and more developed smileys last week. Individual chat and the ever-important smileys are there, but any other ancillary AIM features you might be interested in require the full AIM client.
Google was cagey about whether Gmail will feature other chat protocols such as ICQ in the future. Jason Freidenfelds, a spokesman for Google, said only that he could not comment on whether they were looking at including other chat programs.
Another new feature that Google added last night was colored tabs for labels. This feature, previously only available through plug-ins like Better Gmail, that lets users assign colors to labels to make it easier to keep track of them. From the Labels panel, click on the square next to the label and a drop-down menu of colors will appear. Select a color and your e-mail list will refresh, with the label name on e-mails now in vibrant life-affirming hues.
“The new colors are easily accessible from the Labels menu.”
Google provided little information about the new addition to its service except a brief entry in its Gmail help pages. Besides providing a list of answers to basic questions such as how to sign in and out of AIM or start a chat with an AIM user, the entry noted that the change does not extend to the Google Talk service:
“AIM in Gmail is not a Google Talk and AIM federation;” the page reads, “it is the ability to sign in to your AIM messaging account from Gmail. Gmail uses Open AIM to provide this feature.”
OpenAIM is AIM’s developer program, providing an SDK that allows access to a number of AIM APIs for Web chat, presence, bot authoring and AIM plugins.
The ability to connect to AIM through Gmail is a “very big deal,” said Michael Osterman, founder of messaging analysis firm Osterman Research. About 75 percent of people who use IM in business settings use AIM or the AIM enterprise product, he said.
Now, when people are using Gmail, they can see if the people they are sending e-mail to are available for live chat on AIM instead, he said. “You have been given another option for communicating with people,” he said. “It is one more way to talk to them.”
“Gmail users can keep a history of chats and e-mails together in so-called conversation threads.”
Besides making it easier to see labeled e-mails, when you click on an e-mail that has been labeled you can now search for all e-mails with that label or remove the label from the e-mail directly from buttons next to the e-mail’s subject line.
While colored labels are not a killer feature, they are small touches that make the interface that much easier to use. Combined with the AIM integration and other recent changes, it is hard to understate the usefulness to users of the recently rewritten Gmail source code.
But what many users really want is a true multi-service platform like Meebo or Trillian, which integrate all of the major IM services. Sign in once and you are into all of your accounts. It will be nice to have more interoperability between two major services, but the big hurdle will be to get them all to play nice.