Wizard's Blog

Gmail video chat

Yesterday Google announced the addition of voice and video to Gmail chat.

You download and install a plugin, and then you get extra options in the Gmail chat UI to start a video or voice chat.  It usually seems to work pretty well, though one computer we tried it on ground to a halt.  It has the nice ability to use it one-sided, so someone with a webcam can broadcast to someone without – you don’t need a webcam at both ends.

If someone you want to video chat with hasn’t installed the plugin, when you try to start the chat Gmail will send them a link to the plugin, so you don’t have to explain it to everyone.

The plugin seems to install for all browsers at once, which is nice and painless.

Here’s a video demonstrating the new features:

Once again, Google Talk lags behind Gmail chat, but I’m starting to ask whether Google Talk is really necessary…

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IM-History logo

IM-History is a fairly new service (still in beta) that stores all of the logs from all of your chat programs online.

I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and apart from some teething problems it’s really good.

There have been several times in the past when I’ve reformatted or bought a new computer and lost years worth of chat logs – all of that information is gone forever. It’s nice to not have to worry about that anymore.

IM-History also combines all the logs from all of my computers, and it’s all available on a (password protected) web page, so if I’m at home and I need something that was sent to me at work I can find it.

I use Trillian Astra so that I can use multiple IM mediums within one program, and IM-History plays with it very well. Alternatively, IM-History can collect logs from all popular chat programs, so if I had multiple chat programs installed it would collect and combine all of those logs.

I’ve been active on the IM-History forums and the developers are very keen on fixing any problems that arise and take feature suggestions.