Well, for the past several days, Google has been talking about the new chat features they are integrating into their Gmail client. For me chat is chat, so I wasn’t all that excited. I figured it would be cool and all, but nothing really earth-shattering exciting, if you know what I mean.

But I gotta tell you folks, it is super-stinking cool.

I just discovered that it got installed on one of my Gmail accounts…and since I’m sitting here at work thinking about lunch, I thought I would test it out with Megs, who is the only other person on my contacts list that has it integrated in their account thus far. We are chatting right now…and it’s really swell.

Now, it isn’t über-fancy or anything like that, but since I’m at work behind some serious firewall and chatting isn’t really something that needs to be extravagant…just something I can use to instant message with people…it works really well. There are times that I would rather send an instant message and get an instant response from someone instead of emailing back and forth…and since most of my day is spent in this office, it’s nice to be able to have chat features integrated into what is already one of the coolest email clients on the planet.

On a side note, the other day I was going through my spam folder and clicked on a message from “Paypal.” It wasn’t really from Paypal, but from some internet scoundrel trying to obtain account information. Phishing, if you will. But what was cool is that Gmail displayed this huge RED banner at the top of the message saying, “Warning: This message may not be from whom it appears to be.” I thought it was a really neat way of staying ahead of the game in fraud prevention. So many people fall for scams like this, so it’s nice to know that Google is looking out for us.

If you haven’t switched, I highly encourage you to give Google’s gmail a try. If you want an invite, let me know and I can hook you up. And then you can be cool like me. And chat with me too.