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.
