Google has recently implemented tighter integration between its famed GMail electronic mail service, and Google Talk, its cool—if Spartan in features—instant messaging and voice-chatting software. First, they let us automatically save our GTalk chat history in our GMail accounts. Now, we can actually chat within GMail itself—no need for the GTalk client, since it now works over the web!

Presently, not all GMail account holders have this feature enabled, as Google has just announced the service. If you’re one of the fortunate few who already have “Quick Contacts” on their GMail accounts, then you’re all set to experience seamless email and chatting with GMail.

Using Quick Contacts

Quick Contacts in GMail is the web equivalent of the GTalk client, and has the same general feel and user interface. Clicking on a friend’s name in the list will bring up either a chat window (if he’s online) or compose a new message (if offline). If your correspondent is online, a chat window will appear at the bottom part of the GMail window. This small window can be hidden from view by clicking on the title bar, and detached from the current GMail window by clicking Pop-out.

You can also use the search box in Quick contacts to quickly find GMail contacts. This is pretty useful if you have a lot of friends currently online, and you’ve set the list to show only a few.

Privacy

If you hover your mouse cursor over your contact’s names, you can change the individual view settings and you can see the details of your friends. The Show in Quick Contacts option sets whether your contact can see you as online or offline when you’re logged into GMail, and whether to show or hide the contact from view.

• Never - means that contact will not be shown in the Quick Contacts view
• Always – means the contact will always be displayed in Quick Contacts view regardless of online status
• Auto – means that contact will follow the default specified in your Settings
• Block – means the contact will not see your status as online whenever you’re logged into GMail or GTalk until you unblock him

Default Settings

You can define some preferences by clicking on Settings then the Chat tab to set whether you want to save your chat history, how many contacts you wish to display by default, where the Quick Contacts box will be located, and whom to authorize to view your online status.

GMail’s Quick Contacts feature is still quite new, and we can expect a lot of changes in the near future, as Google fine tunes the features. Google is a search giant, but in terms of web services, I guess they can’t help but go through some growing pains.