12:45 PM, Feb 22, 2006
Quick Contacts
Even though last night was the first Big Band night at Harling's, in two weeks, I decided, with a couple of friends, to meet down at 75th St Brewery, over gmail's fantastic new quick contacts/chat thing. It combines google talk, which I've been using for months, with the magic of gmail, so you can instant message people without needing to worry about a corporate firewall, or even installed IM software. Here's how it looks in my email.
Anyway, we decided, in the end, to just meet down at the River Market Brewery, and also, in the end, it just turned out to be Jeff and me. We had a couple of beers, and called it a night.
I showed the quick contacts and chat to another friend today, and he is now hooked, as well.
chicus offered:
I actually hate this new feature. I want the hot side hot and the cool side cool. Er, I want my IM client to be an IM client and my webmail to be webmail.
Having contact information is integral to a good email client but signing you in to their IM client by default is not. Just because I want to check email doesn't mean I also want to be available to talk with others.
It is far too reminiscent of Hotmail and Outlook logging me into MSN Messenger by default and then having messages pop open before I have a chance to log out.
I do give Google credit because I was able to easily turn this off, unlike the MSN stuff which required me to uninstall messenger.
7:23 AM, Feb 23, 2006