Chat in Gmail

For many people, including me as of last night, Gmail now includes chat via Google Talk. And I must say that it’s very cool and nicely implemented. I tried a chat this morning (I was using Gmail’s web interface, he was using gaim) and it worked great. The amazing thing was that the chat transcript in my gmail account was updated live as we were talking. I did a search for a piece of mail and that chat showed up while we were still going.

It’s a very nice piece of integration, and it makes perfect sense.

Lately, I’ve been having a little trouble with Gmail becoming unresponsive. I considered downloading my Gmail to Apple Mail, but the Gmail interface is just so much better for threaded conversations. There’s enough of a difference that I’m willing to put up with a little downtime for the sake of the better UI. And I thought desktop apps were supposed to be better?