Did you notice the new feature in your Gmail?
Gmail now has a link called Gmail Chats.
Click the link in your Gmail to open a list of contacts.
Click the contacts and you’ll open IM sessions in your browser IE and Firefox.
You’ll be set to have voice conversations with your pals for FREE–that’s NO money.
What’s WAY COOL is the way the Google Talk works inside Gmail. Check it out. To quote Google
About Gmail
Gmail is an experiment in a new kind of webmail, built on the idea that you should never have to delete mail and you should always be able to find the message you want.Search, don’t sort.
Use Google search to find the exact message you want, no matter when it was sent or received.Don’t throw anything away.
Over 2692.883065 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you’ll never need to delete another message.Keep it all in context.
Each message is grouped with all its replies and displayed as a conversation
Don’t have Gmail?
You might have to wait a while. I tried to open a second account and got a message saying that it’s by invitation only. Guess they figure they’re going to be busy keeping current customers hooked up and going. They’re probably right. Someone tried to call me with this service already tonight. Like I said, “It’s WAY COOL.”
–ME “Liz” Strauss
You could always send yourself an invitation, to another non-gmail email address. If you check at the bottom left of the page, you should see where you can invite someone. It might take a few days to ge some invitations to use, but every gmail account holder can invite someone else. Alternatively, you can ask me for an invite (or countless others on the web). I have 100 to give away.
I used to despise ‘hotmail’, ‘yahoo’, ‘netscape’ or ‘gmail’ type email accounts with a passion .. and personally recommend businesses avoid using them .. Yet, here I am with my own google ‘gmail’ account. I use the plugin http://www.skippy.net/blog/plugins/ with all my blogs, and when I do backups – I just email the backup to my googlemail/gmail account. I like that google doesn’t delete your messages, whereas hotmail for instance, will delete your inactive account.
How is google talk? I was going to test it out, (I use MSN Messenger) but I still haven’t gotten around to installing Trillian yet … I want to wait to see if it’s even necessary to worry about g/talk.
Thanks Alan,
Thanks why we say half the show’s in the comments. Your information makes the post that much more informative. I appreciate you chiming in.
ssmiles,
Liz
EVERYONE SHOUTS: HART!
Hi Hart!
How did you sneak in without anyone noticing? 🙂
I’m a lot like you when it comes to hotmail etc. My husband’s a security rambo man. I’ve never heard a complaint about gmail or Google talk–even from my son in college or any of his friends. College folks seem to be saavy on what’s useful in those kinds of things. I’ve only used Google talk once myself. It was cool, but I’m no expert.
Liz
1,2,3 … HART!
You know, I’ve never gotten into gmail/hotmail/yahoo email accounts and I still don’t so nothing much to add here 🙂
I’m with Hart here – for business it’s plain ugly to use the freebies.
I’ve had the one “pop” email account since I started (’96) and everything gets forwarded to it.
Google Talk … you know, I was using Skype for a while there but had to really sever myself off of it – that and IM, for me, is totally unproductive – I’ve been known to waste a good hour or four skyping or IMing a night, but if I want to keep my sanity and actualy run an “successful” online business I had to drop that addiciton 🙂
But I keep hearing how good Gmail is – sell me on it…
Hey Martin,
I’m not the one to sell you on it.
Once I was on an airplane with a guy who told me he just got a mobile home that had all of the stuff–computer, copier, fax, telephone, everything. I just looked at him and said, “One of us is doing something wrong. I do everything I can to get away from that stuff.”
Liz
kudos to you – why complicate life even more?
My motto with technology: just because you can, doesn’t mean you have to.
Every week another new handful of “must have” web2.0 apps hits the market – only thing that has excited me much this year so far is coComments, everything else is just another layer of information overload I just don’t need.
That must mean that I’m obviously no super-uber-techy-geek kind of a guy.
I think it started when I would take a yearly plane trip that was worth 25,000 air miles. I got to the point where I knew that two small books were smarter than one fat one. People would say, “You should get . . .” and I would answer, “Just one more thing to carry.”
I sounded like my mother . . . “One more thing to dust.” 🙂
Martin … re: Gmail ..
A while back, I was having some server problems with some hosted blogs and I went to the wordpress support forums. Podz helped me out and practically saved me from oblivion. He noticed that in my cPanel that I was able to set up “cron” jobs. Basically, if you have that ability, you can set up nightly backup jobs of your database. Well, we tried and my server wasn’t compatible, but I was still able to install the plugin by Skippy and make regular backups (which I do every Friday) and EMAIL them to me.
Before, I used to make the backups, and store it on my server, then FTP it over to my own computer. Currently, my backups are ranging between 2MB and 6MB in size and growing (I’m not sure if that size is normal and I have never had the need to restore it to see if it was a good backup either btw).
I email the backups to my Google account and can see it arrive almost instantaneously. What’s nice is that I’ve got so many blogs happening, I just go from one blog to another and do my backups and email them all at the same time. Inside my googlemail account, I can see all of the backups as attachments sent by each blog email address.
Just backing up your wordpress site in the root and all subfolders will not save you – if your blog dies .. you can always download a new version of wordpress and a new theme, but you may not be able to recover your previous articles and comments (Where ~your~ show is!)
Backups. Good. All the Time. Now. Do it!
Oh – you can check Podz page here: http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/ The cron job instructions are on the right side. There is also other great tips and tutorials here.
EVERBODY: HART!
Wow! Thanks for that! You wrote a whole how-to post here in the comments. Give me a good title and I’ll reference it in the post. Bettter yet . . . I think you just invented a new feature!
I could pull your advice out of the comment and make it a post of it’s own–We could call it Beyond the Posts and I could put there excerpts from that weeks comments, sage advice and practical tips like you just wrote here.
Gosh HART you’re so good!
Liz
The feature has yet to pop up in my Gmail account (any of them, actually – I have like, 4). I’m looking forward to playing around with it.
Josh,
I was having the same problem. Then I signed out, and signed back in again, and there popped up the option to do funky things with Gmail chat.
Cas,
I’ve been logging in / out off and on since the announcement about it. Still nothin’. 🙁
I guess Google isn’t ready to show me some chat love just yet.
Josh,
Cas just has that magic touch.
They’ll get to you. Then you can call me and I’ll tell you how Cas does it, 🙂
Liz
I feel a bit bad now. Here’s me being given this new toy to play with – and I don’t actually want to play with it.
If it makes you feel any better Josh, Gmail won’t let me get it on my other three Gmail accounts. Just the one that got set up this morning – and that by mistake because I clicked the link whilst half asleep! The only thing I can think of that I did differently was that I was on a completely different computer (a public one down the library), so there were no prior cookies or anything.
Perhaps Google was just feeling bad this morning for taking so long to index my site properly…
Hey Cas,
It’s Google. There’s no explaining the mysteries of search engines. That’s why they call them mysteries. 🙂
Liz
Cas,
No worries. It sounds like a vaguely interesting feature, but I doubt I’ll use it. Most of my contacts in Gmail don’t even have a Gmail address, so it’s really a moot point for me.
Google are apparently introducing it server by server, location by location. They plan on having it all going over the next few weeks. I’d say that if you haven’t got it yet, it’s because they haven’t got to the server yet that your account is on. Patience, it’ll happen. 🙂
Thanks for the update, Alan.
It’s great how when we all work together we seem to have the whole picture not just pieces of it.
Liz