GTalk Got The AIM Communication

By Scott Gilbertson

Gmail's Google Talk widget can now handle AIM chats. The new feature isn't the fabled AIM integration with GTalk, rather it adds the option to sign in to your AIM account through GTalk, but for heavy Gmail and AIM users this is great, if not perfect, news.

To use the new features just click on the upside-down triangle next to “set status here” in the Gmail chat box and select “Sign into AIM” from the drop down menu.

Once you’re logged in to AIM your contacts will appear along with your Gmail contacts. As with GTalk conversations, your AIM chat logs are stored and searchable via the Gmail interface, provided you tell Gmail to store your chat logs.

The main downside is that if you have buddies in both AIM and GTalk they will show up twice in your contacts list.

Presumably that’s one of things that could be fixed with true integration between GTalk and AIM. But despite that fact that Google and AOL signed an agreement way back in 2005 to allow “Google Talk and AIM instant messaging users to communicate with each other, provided certain conditions are met,” the fruits of that deal have yet to emerge.

For now the GTalk/AIM features are limited to Gmail (not the Google Gadget or desktop versions of GTalk) and are only available to English users, but Google says more language support is on the way.

Posted in: AIM,Google,Gtalk,itgadget,latest by google