I have written before about the Webmail Wars. If you have followed the story so far you’ll know that like a lot of people I am an ex-Hotmail user, and now that I use Gmail for all my emails. Back in September when there was a lot of buzz about the new services to compete with Gmail I asked:

Perhaps the more interesting question is: What will Gmail do? And possibly most importantly when?

And I’d say that with the release of Gmail Chat, we sort of have an answer. Gmail are going to continue to improve the service that they offer. Put simply Gmail Chat is a web based IM system built on AJAX technology (i.e. built to be smooth) and integrated with the Jabber Network, and of course the Google Talk client. It means that if I want to email someone who is at that time checking their Gmail account or is connected to the Jabber Network then we can talk via instant messenger. There is no download required. And it only offers very limited functionality when compared with a desktop client, or quite a bit of functionality when compared with any other current web based messenger.

To accomodate it into the Gmail interface was obviously a tricky task. But I think that it has been done quite well. They added a “Quick Contacts” box down the side of every screen which acts as your control panel for chatting. You can choose whether people appear in this box using controls in the main Contacts list. And depending on their privacy settings you may need to “Invite them to Chat” before you can get talking. When invited you get a little box within your Quick Contacts box to ask you whether you want who ever has invited you to be able to seen when you are online. You can set some privacy defaults in the Chat tab of the Settings screen. You can see in this screenshot that you can change your status to something custom, you can appear busy, or you can sign out of Chat altogether even if you want to keep checking you emails.

There is also an option to view Gmail without chat, which I think is an important thing to consider, this feature does run the risk of feeling gimmicky and not for everyone. So what is the chat actually like itself? Well firstly big points for the Gmail team by not making the interface (by default anyway) a load of pop ups. Instead the chat window becomes anchored to the bottom of the browser window. This means that it displays over your Inbox, Trash, Spam (or whatever you are looking at). This helps to give a real desktop feel, and the windows are collapsable to the base of the window. They initially appear blue but they flash bright orange as an alert when someone sends you a message (and you don’t have your cursor in the reply box). This sending of a message also triggers their name to flash orange in Quick Contacts. Again a desktop feel. The chat windows line up from right to left. And I have managed to get a maximum at any one time of four. I am not sure if more is possible, it is hard enough to get four people online ready to chat!

The chat windows can “pop out” of the interface. And then they appear as standard pop up windows. You may need to whitelist mail.google.com in your Firefox browser for this to work properly. You may notice that all of these windows lack a “Send Message” button. This is a real space saver. And when you send your first messages it will politely tell you that you just need to hit the “Enter” key to send your message. You can send some emoticons. Although they are perhaps not the nicest ones you’ve ever seen. Where is the yellow smiley face? I don’t know. The chat itself is very smooth. And you can’t notice any lag (or it is very limited) and you can’t feel the window refreshing or anything. So that is all good. It doesn’t have the “unusable” feel of a lot of web messengers currently have.

With this Chat feature Gmail also unveiled saving your Chats in Gmail for Google Talk and for any Chats you have in Gmail. For a lot of people this was a real missing feature when Google Talk was first released. Why can’t I save my messages? Well this offers the solution and really raises the bar. Saving your IM conversations as text files on your computer is not much of a solution. However having them neatly formatted and placed in a specific area of your Gmail account where you can access (and add to them) from anywhere is very cool. You access these saved Chats using the option on the menu on the left hand side, and although they all initially accumulate in the Chat section, they are treatable like emails. You can move them to the inbox. You can apply your normal labels. You can reply to then like emails. You can delete them like emails etc. When a chat is displayed in the Inbox it has the speech bubble log attached at the far end of the message where you sometimes see a paperclip for mail with attachments.

These features are still being rolled out at the moment. And everyone will have them soon. I think they show further innovation on behalf of Gmail which is very good news for everyone concerned. The list of features that they have added recently is a very long one indeed. But where does it mean that Gmail is head? No one can tell. But it certainly shows that despite brand new interfaces coming from Gmail’s top two competitors, Hotmail (my review - 1, 2) and Yahoo Mail, Gmail is still in for the fight. And just because we can’t tell what is coming next at this stage. It doesn’t stop us guessing.