AIM in GMail Chat
Yesterday while changing my status on GMail Chat I noticed something that I can only describe as ‘awesome’. Below my “busy” status messages I saw the AOL Instant Messenger icon accompanied by the text, “Sign into AIM.” Beginning yesterday, according to the Official GMail Blog, Firefox users and English IE7 users have the ability to sign into AIM using the Chat function in GMail. It organizes your buddies alphabetically by status, and any AIM buddies have the AIM icon to the right of their name. The different order is something to get used to, but I can live without the groups if it means GTalk functionality for my AIM screen name.
As someone who accesses a multitude of different computers daily, I’ve got to say this is really convenient. Now my entire buddy list is mobile so if I do need to contact someone, I don’t need to worry about the computer having an AIM client or having to use portable apps. With this I can basically live my life out of a browser.
Of course, I do have one simple request (incidentally, in programming simple requests aren’t usually simple): AIM support in the GTalk desktop application. If that happens, there is a good chance I won’t be using the AIM desktop client anymore. None the less, yet again Google has wowed me.
