Gmail Becomes More Like Yahoo IM, Adds Group Chat and Rich Emoticons

The Official Gmail Blog just announced the addition of group chat and rich emoticons into Gmail’s chat facility. The Gmail Group Chat allows multiple chat with Gmail contacts at once. Any participant can invite another participant. Starting a chat  is pretty simple, once you start a chat session with a friend, you can easily pull down the Group Chat options and add whoever you want to invite in the current chat session. 

If you’ve been using Yahoo IM before, you’d remember this as similar to the Conference feature in Yahoo IM session. I’m just wondering why Google took this long to introduce this feature into Gmail’s Chat facility. And while we’re at it, why is the chat function embedded in Gmail and not in GTalk anyway? 

In addition to the group chat facility, some new rich emoticons were also added into the good old Gmail classic smileys. 

These two new features works only with the new version of Gmail. So IE users would not have the Chat function in their Gmail account as Google is still to roll out the new Gmail for  IE users.

Written By:
PG

Arnold Zafra

Arnold Zafra writes daily on the announcements by Google, Ask.com, Yahoo & MSN along with how these announcements effect web publishers. He is currently building three niche blogs covering iPad News, Google Android Phones and E-Book Readers.

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Comments

  1. Adam says:

    Cool. Gmail is getting better, it already has a good email management.

  2. DeepFreeze says:

    Thats really nice to know. Now there need to add more featurez.

  3. Vagner says:

    I can live without rich emotion, but adding group chat is really useful

  4. SirCommy says:

    I’m sorry but I will have to disagree, Gmail is way different than Yahoo and you’ll find similarities in their work because both have the same goal and most of their activities are the same. But they are two different worlds. Sure, Yahoo has some facilities that we’d wish to have on Gmail and vice-versa, but that’s why I’m using both.
    Cheers to both

  5. sohbet says:

    gmail is the best.

  6. Sohbet says:

    Gmaail wonderful.

  7. Dallas says:

    Thanks for the news. Did not know they had put that in place. That shoudl make a pretty cool application to have. Thanks for the read