Yay! Chat in Gmail is being rolled out to the peoples. I’ve been using this a lot internally, and it’s great that it’s public now. Google doesn’t have too much of an IM culture, at least in engineering, so putting chat in our e-mail windows has been a really nice way to bootstrap realtime communications. And, search over e-mail and chat logs is integrated. Very handy.
I don’t use Gmail outside of work, so I won’t get much use out of the public release. I can bet, though, that when the Google Talk–AIM bridge is done this will be huge.
