Google has added a new chat feature to Google+. When I opened up the service this morning, I was greeted with a message that said: If you click that “learn more” link, Google says, “Google Chat makes it easy to …

GroupMe announced today that it has agreed to be acquired by Skype. GroupMe is a popular group messaging service. On its company blog, GroupMe writes: Over the last few months, we had been in talks with Skype that started with …

Facebook recently rolled out a new home page interface that displays a select list of the user’s friends along the vertical length of the right side of the screen. It makes it easy to see when these friends are available …

Facebook is currently holding a live announcement discussing the launch of three new Facebook integrations today, group chat, video calling (powered by Skype) and a new design for Facebook chat. During the product introduction portion, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took …

A minor update hit Facebook today as it added an indicator to your profile that alerts friends to your online status.  On the home page, friends available for chat still reside on the left side and you still have the …

Google has a new Google Labs experiment out called Talk Guru. Google describes it as: Application intended for chat (IM) users, including users using chat clients on low-end phones, allowing them to answer simple web queries from the context of …

About 22 months ago, Google launched a voice and video chat feature within Gmail, allowing many people to have live, face-to-face conversations with their friends and colleagues.  Now, a few more folks – Linux users – will finally be permitted to take advantage of it, too.

Whatever sorts of microphones and webcams the average Gmail user has attached to his (or her) computer may soon start getting a lot more use.  Yesterday evening, Google made the video chat, voice chat, and group chat features much more prominent.

Sending someone a picture or document while chatting online can seem like the most natural thing in the world; it’s common enough for topics like children or school papers to be discussed.  So Google’s upgraded one of its offerings by making it easier for people to trade files.

ChatRoulette is a site that is getting a lot of attention. Some think it could be the "next big thing" on the web. The concept is simple. You chat via a webcam or keyboard with random strangers. If you don’t like the one you’re currently connected to, just click a button (or hit F9), and you’re on to the next one. Maybe at some point you can find someone you like, have something in common with, or don’t find incredibly repulsive.

Google announced today that it has released chat in the Google Translator Toolkit.

"Collaboration is an important part of translation," says Kartik Singh, Software Engineer for the Translator Toolkit. "Whether you work with editors to translate documents, customers to clarify terms or project managers to meet deadlines, working with other translators is key to making high-quality translations."

Google now has a video chat application that can be used from your iGoogle home page. This is just the latest feature Google has added to its ever-growing list of products/features that make it more like a giant social network.

Update: Google has mysteriously added a little promotion to its homepage for "new" gmail voice and video chat. This original article is from November, so unless I’m missing something, it’s not exactly a new featue. I guess they just want to give it some attention. I haven’t seen any new Google blog posts about it or anything:

Earlier this month, Facebook showed off its new friends page and the ability to create friends lists to organize your friends into separate groups. For example, I could have people from my high school in one list, and my co-workers in another.

Facebook has launched the ability to let users chat within applications on Facebook. This keeps applications within the social network even more social.

If a developer uses the new fb:chat-invite FBML tag, they can display a list of users’ online friends and let them invite their friends to chat. Developers can also give users the freedom to choose which friends they want to appear in their chat lists within the apps.

Gmail chat has come to iGoogle. This means users will be able to chat with their friends and associates without leaving the comfort of their Google homepage.

The feature is not a gadget like most of your iGoogle features. The chat feature comes in the form of a sidebar and resides below the left-hand navigation menu.

Yahoo announced that it now offers an SMS chat feature in its classic version of Yahoo Mail, something Gmail has been offering for several months, and Yahoo has been doing in its newer version since 2007.

Google has offered SMS in its chat since October, and Chat in general for quite some time. They have also launched voice and video chat recently.

Google has added a new feature to Gmail, which allows users to watch videos within their chat windows. This eliminates the need to leave your Gmail window when someone sends you one.

Instant messaging and group chat provider Meebo is now allowing users to communicate with each other through both MySpace and Facebook IDs as well as all the other ones previously supported, like AIM, Yahoo, Google, MSN, Jabber, ICQ, etc.

We’re just trying it out for cell phones in the United States right now, but you can send texts to your friends with US phone numbers from anywhere in the world.