Interesting to go back to past!

Google has launched Gmail voice and video chat, making it easier for people to chat in high-quality video for free right within Gmail.

Users only  require a webcam and a small web browser plugin, to start video chatting.

Gmail voice and video chat lets users start a video chat without switching to another application or signing up for another account. Users who don’t have a webcam, can simply chat by voice.

To get started, users have to open a Gmail chat window, click on the “Options” menu at the bottom, and choose “Add voice/video chat,” which will take them through a one-time installation of a free plugin (a quick 2 MB download). When Gmail is re-opened users will notice that their “Options” link in their chat window has changed to “Video & more”. Opening this menu and clicking “Start video chat” will start it off. Users can pop out the video and change its size and position, or switch to full screen.

Gmail voice and video chat is being rolled out on PCs and on Macs.

Google Apps customers get this service as well, at no extra charge, and can voice or video chat with any other Gmail or Apps users.

To use voice and video chat, a PC must have Windows XP or a more recent version, or an Intel-Based Mac with Mac OS X v10.4 or later. It works in browsers that support the latest version of Gmail (Google Chrome, Firefox 2.0+, Internet Explorer 7.0, and Safari 3.0).

You know the classic Google logo? Those colorful letters in that distinctive font?

Now the power of Google, or at least its logo, can be yours.
Go here and type in your own name. You’ll see. It gives “ego Googling” a whole new meaning.

Many thanks to reader Richard D. for sending along this hilarious link.

By MIKE MALONE

Google announced Google Gears, an open source browser extension that lets web applications work offline (though I think there are more interesting ways to use the platform). Lots of blogs have picked up the story, including TechCrunch, Mashable, and lifehacker. But most simply regurgitate information from Google’s official press release. They don’t explain how the platform works at all.

I’ve spent the morning reading over the Gears documentation, and working through some sample applications. Here are my notes. I’m hoping they’ll provide enough of an overview to get started with Gears without wading through dozens of pages of documentation yourself.

Before I begin, if you haven’t done so already, get started by installing Google Gears now.

What is Google Gears?

The inaugural post on the Google Gears Blog says “Gears is an incremental improvement to the web as it is today. It adds just enough to AJAX to make current web applications work offline.” And they absolutely deliver on that promise.

The Gears toolkit consists of three fairly independent components. Each component improves some challenging aspect of client-side web programming. I’ll briefly describe each component, then get into the details. Read Full