Google Gmail gets talking

Over the next coming weeks Google will embed its Talk instant messaging service into its Gmail mail service. The company refers to this new instant messaging software as Gmail Chat, as this new service will add chat functionality to Gmail.

Features:

Add contacts and invite your friends to chat from Quick Contacts

See when your friends are online

Set your status to busy, sleepy, angry or whatever. Even sneezy.

Get Google Talk to make free voice calls too. It's completely synchronized with Quick Contacts

Go off the record when you're chatting so nothing gets saved to anyone's Gmail account