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We all love Google Talk for a bunch of reasons, but one thing which I always felt as missed out from Google Talk was the ability to appear offline to your contacts. Both Yahoo and Windows Live Messenger had this feature sine a long time, and they allowed me to stealthily chat with my close buddies, while staying focused on my work.
Gmail’s built-in chat has now added a new status – "invisible", which does exactly the same thing. You can appear offline to your contacts by choosing "invisible" from the drop down status menu. With the invisible status, your contacts can’t see you online, but you’ll still be able to see their presence or even chat with them.
If you are using Google Talk’s standalone client or gadget, then this feature is not available to you. Unfortunately, Google seems to have forgotten about Google Talk desktop client. We can’t really blame them because Gmail chat is the most widely used flavor of GTalk!
[Via: Google OS]
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wrote, on February 26th, 2008
See my thoughts on why invisibility violates the social (networking) contract: http://tropophilia.com/2008/02.....-contract/
wrote, on February 26th, 2008
I have only just started with google talk, or atleast what I think what is google talk, it came along with the new gmail address I added to have something other than a bluebottle account. For chats I use AIM, and one of my friends said it was bad for your computer, with all the spam chats or whatever. I don’t have those because I only have a few buddies, who, as you were explaining google talk enables us to do, appear offline or invisible. I love the feature!
wrote, on February 26th, 2008
That is certainly a welcome addition. I’m not generally one for appearing offline when I am not, but occassionally it would be good to have the option.
wrote, on February 26th, 2008
A long awaited feature, finally added.
wrote, on February 26th, 2008
[...] (vÃa: TechBuzz) [...]
wrote, on February 27th, 2008
[...] via Tech-Buzz.net [...]
wrote, on April 6th, 2008
Hi, I’m using gmail but I don`t have the invisible option, do you know why?