The Montoya Herald, a weblog about Blueprint, jQuery, design, music and life, publishing on the web since September 2005. Written by Christian Montoya: developer, designer and entrepreneur.

Gmail chat: the latest Google failure

Posted on February 22, 2006.

Some moron at Google thought integrating chat with a webmail client would be a good idea. Unfortunately this moron is still employed. Their claim to (in)fame is Gmail chat, the most useless Google feature yet. Not only is Gmail chat stupid, it’s clearly missing these key chat features:

• Avatars
• Smilies
• Nudges
• Winks
• Webcams

The only thing Gmail chat does offer you is, well, plain text chat. Who cares about that?

Here’s a sample of what a Gmail chat would look like:

googlefanboy06: Hi! Whatz up?
notStupid: Wha…? Oh… nothing.
googlefanboy06: Whatcha doin?
notStupid: Reading e-mail.
googlefanboy06: Wanna chat?
notStupid: No.

Plus, you can save all your chats right in Gmail! Forget privacy, all your conversations are logged on Google’s servers, just waiting to be sold and/or used against you. Welcome to the future!

Update May 2 2006: Turns out Gmail Chat does have smilies, but they are hideous. Ugliest smilies I've ever seen. Make you queasy too.

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1 Comments

1. Steve Austin on September 19, 2008

   Nice. I wouldn't get too uptight about giving up your privacy though, not when millions of us suckers use webmail, web calendars, web whatever, all of it on someone else's servers…
   And don't get me started about online banking..