If you click that “learn more” link, Google says, “Google Chat makes it easy to chat with people you have relationships with. In Google+, you can chat with anyone in your Circles who also has added you to their Circles. And, when you’re not using Google Plus, you’ll still be able to chat with them using Google products including, Gmail, the Google Talk client, iGoogle, Orkut and 3rd party apps.”

Previously, you could only chat with people if you knew their email address, so this opens up a whole new line of instant communication, and eliminates one of Facebook’s advantages in terms of features.

Rather than displaying all of your contacts in a single chat list, it will show you contacts from your most recent conversations that are online. You can also use the search box to find the others.

Chat is obviously one of the most social features of any product online. It’s direct, instant conversation. I don’t know how crucial it is to the success of Google+, but it certainly can’t hurt. I know Facebook chat gets used quite a bit.

Google needs to integrate the group messaging of the Google+ mobile app here as well. As it stands right now, I have an ongoing discussion going among myself and a few other people via the messaging feature, but no way to access that conversation from the web interface (or if I do, it’s extremely hidden).

It’s interesting that Google+ launched with video chat (hangouts) ahead of text chat, but now it has both, and should be better for it. By the way, you can video chat from the chat feature itself as well.

On its company blog, GroupMe writes:

Over the last few months, we had been in talks with Skype that started with discussions about potential commercial partnerships. As we got to know the core Skype team better, though, and as our conversations evolved, it quickly became evident that our visions were perfectly aligned. Both companies are focused on changing the way the world communicates, and helping people stay in touch with the people they really know. With a shared vision—an ambitious one—we decided our efforts to own real-time communications and the real life network could be best executed as one company.

This has been a remarkable year for GroupMe, and we believe that this is a big win. And not just a big win for GroupMe and our amazing investors, but also for New York City. As part of the deal, GroupMe will remain in New York, team intact, working on our standalone application. The major difference will be that we will now have access to Skype’s 175 million monthly connected users. 175 million people. That’s a very big deal. 

“This acquisition is another step towards our vision to provide a global multi-modal and multi-platform communications experience,” says Skype CEO Tony Bates on Skype’s blog. “It complements our existing leadership in voice and video communications by providing best in class mobile text-based communications and innovative features around group messaging that enable users to connect, share locations and photos and make plans with their closest ties.”

“This latest acquisition, coupled with our acquisition of Qik earlier this year, augments our role as an innovator in driving unique mobile user experiences,” he adds.

Qik would be the company’s live streaming video offering.

“The GroupMe team has created an incredibly sticky group messaging experience that works across mobile devices and platforms, making it a perfect addition to our voice, video and text products,” says Bates. “We’re excited about introducing their disruptive product to our global user base.”

Skype itself of course recently agreed to be acquired by Microsoft for $8.5 billion.

According to Tricia Duryee, citing people familiar with the matter, Skype is paying about $85 million for GroupMe. This is unconfirmed. Terms were not discussed by Skype or GroupMe.

The problem, which many of us have probably noticed, but few have really made an issue of in the press/Blogosphere is that it is now harder to find other friends who may actually be online and available to chat. That’s because Facebook is filtering this list of friends to the ones it assumes you’ll want to chat with.

Josh Constine at InsideFacebook has a new post discussing this, in which he shares the reasoning provided by Facebook’s Director of Product Peter Deng. Deng says, “The goal of the new design is to give more people faster access to the friends they message most. Looking at the early data of how people are engaging with and using Chat, things are moving in this direction.”

That may be true, but should it be at the cost of slower access to those we don’t necessarily talk to all the time, but are still friends with, and may feel the need to strike up a conversation to say hi every now and then? We’re already friends on Facebook aren’t we?

The nice thing about seeing when ANY of your friends were available online was that you might have noticed someone you hadn’t talked to in a long time and felt like saying hello. It almost served as a convenient way to keep in touch with those with whom you were once close, but don’t necessarily think about or have the time to write a message to on any given busy day. If you just happened to notice them in the available chat list, well that was a different story.

Now, you have to go so far as to search for that friend to even figure out if they’re available to chat, and if you don’t talk to them often enough for them to appear on your new chat list, what are the chances that you’re actually going to do this very often.

Facebook has come under criticism in recent months for the way it filters content in the news feed, and recent reports even indicate that a new unfiltered news feed is on the way, presumably in response to such criticism (though as it stands now, you can adjust your feed settings to show what you want it to show).

Facebook has been a big contributor to the “filter bubble” concept, in terms of filtering content, and now, it seems they’re filtering how we actually interact with our friends as well.

But at least we’re able get “faster access” to the friends we message the most. You know, because it was such a slow, cumbersome process before.

By the way, the system is flawed, because there are some people on my list that I never talk to, and there is someone I talked to a few days ago at length that is nowhere to be found on my list.

Essentially, social networking, in relation to getting people to join is not the primary motivation. From Zuckerberg’s perspective, the infrastructure is in place, Facebook is essentially ubiquitous with the public, and now, it’s time to build desired applications on top of the established infrastructure. He indicates this position by saying:

The world generally believes social networking is everywhere. Over the next five years, the inflection is not on wiring the world, but on building cool apps…

Understanding your position in the world is an important aspect, and Zuckerberg knows exactly where Facebook stands as an Internet property. With such a proliferation of Facebook users, he understands that sharing is now the focal point. According to his opening statements, sharing doubles on a year-to-year basis. For instance, this year, sharing is done twice as much as it was last year, and it’s growing on a yearly basis.

In fact, sharing is the focal point for Facebook’s strategy going forward, if only because of how many people take part in it. During his comments, Zuckerberg revealed that “4 billion items are shared every day,” and now, Facebook wants to leverage and/or build tools that streamline the process. Furthermore, he stated that “sharing is growing faster than user growth,” and that sharing per person is growing even more. To Facebook, this is perhaps the most important metric in regards to what creations to concentrate on. From here, Zuckerberg proceeded to introduce the new products that are available now.

Concerning the three products discussed, Zuckerberg offered his thoughts. Regarding the group chat feature, it’s pretty simple. According to the Facebook founder, “a lot of people asked for it,” and so, here we are. Because so many Facebook members are active in various groups, adding such a feature — which is activated by clicking a member and “adding” them to the chat — is an obvious move. The same applies to video chat, which is powered by Skype, although, Facebook users don’t have to have the software installed to enjoy it. As for the chat redesign, Facebook’s developers want to make use of the widescreen resolutions so many computer users have now, and if you have such a display, a freestanding buddy list will appear, allowing users to access the chat functions that much easier.

These additions are about what people expected as the rumor mill churned, waiting for the announcement to become official. As for future applications, Zuckerberg revealed Facebook would rather rely on independent entrepreneurs who focus solely on app development to create upcoming Facebook apps. The reason for this has to do with focus. Facebook would rather focus on building a solid infrastructure that allows developers to build additional applications. Zuckerberg believes people who focus solely on application development would do a better job than large companies who have a great deal on their plates.

Was that a subtle slam of Apple and/or Google?

From there, Zuckerberg turned the proceedings over to his developers, who discussed the functionality of the new features. Essentially, the goal is this: Facebook has a lot of people who share and communicate via the Facebook platform and therefore, the new features will try to improve how users do things. Outside of that, independent developers will be looked at to increase the functionality beyond Facebook’s current strategy.

The indicators are familiar to Facebook users as the little green dot will appear for friends who are online and able to chat, the crescent will appear for idle friends and the hollow circle will appear for friends who are offline or have turned off their chat feature.  The indicator is now located directly to the right of your name at the top of your profile.

Facebook chat released in 2008, and for the first couple of years was much maligned for its connection issues.  Few things were as frustrating as Facebook chat for users trying to relay time sensitive information to one another.  Mid 2010, however, Facebook made some changes and since then Facebook chat has been much more functional.

Facebook has also experimented with how to notify users who is online and available for chat.  Some time ago, a chat link would appear under a friend’s profile picture to signal their availability.  Recently, the top right of the profile had buttons for “chat” and “poke.”  Now in that spot there are two button that say “message” and “poke.”  Clicking the message button for an online friend will open a chat box.    Clicking the message button for an offline friend will take you to the messaging screen.

As InsideFacebook points out, this update could be Facebook’s way of raising the popularity of its chat feature:

Therefore, the prominent placement of the online status indicator is probably an attempt on Facebook’s part to increase the number of Chats and Messages sent. Now when a user clicks through to a friend’s profile from a photo or news feed update, they’ll immediately be shown whether they can instantly communicate with that friend. In this way, the green icon serves as an invitation to Chat.

Facebook also made another little tweak to chat recently, as instead of asking whether you want chat with an suddenly offline friend to be sent as a message, it notifies you that it will be doing that and does it automatically.

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 their chat application. First invite guru@googlelabs.com to chat, and then send queries via your chat client. Categories supported include weather, translation, unit and currency conversions, and sports scores. Send “help” for more information.

Common thinking is that this is somehow related to Aardvark, the social Q&A service Google acquired last year. We’ve yet to hear from Google about that.

When you sign up for Talk Guru, it becomes part of your Gmail experience within Chat. It doesn’t appear to be incredibly sophisticated, and I have a hard time seeing how this will be any more useful than simply searching at any point in time. Here are some examples of the kinds of things it’s supposed to be able to return.

I didn’t have much luck finding any info about the upcoming Final Four. “Well, it hasn’t happened yet,” I thought. “Surely ‘elite 8′ will yield better results”. Not so much. “Kentucky score?” Nope.

That said, it is just an experimental project in its early stages, and it is intended more for low-end phones.

Late yesterday, Tristan Schmelcher, a software engineer, wrote on the Gmail Blog, "If you’ve been wanting to use voice and video chat on Linux (our top video chat request), then we have good news for you: it’s now available!"

Schmelcher then spilled some specifics by continuing, "Visit gmail.com/videochat to download the plugin and get started.  Voice and video chat for Linux supports Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions, and RPM support will be coming soon."

This development represents a respectable nod to the Linux community if you believe in the phrase "better late than never."  And it’s not like Google could have improved the situation by waiting longer.

Still, it’s hard to imagine Linux users aren’t feeling a little underappreciated due to the 22-month delay, so the matter of how quickly RPM support does (or doesn’t) arrive will bear watching.

Going forward, Google might want to do a better job of keeping the latest versions of other products and services available to Linux users, as well.

A post on the Official Gmail Blog explained, "Video chat, voice chat, and group chat have all been available for some time within Gmail, but they’ve been curiously tucked away.  Getting them up and running required fidgeting with a little menu at the bottom of each chat window.  Starting today, all of these features will be just a single click away."

More advanced options like "Go off the record," "Block," and "Send SMS" are then available via the easy-to-see "Actions" menu.

Plus, if one user wants to interact with another who doesn’t yet have the video and voice chat plugin installed, there’s a little icon the first user can click to send an invitation.

This update could turn out to be a good way for Google to make up ground in the "social" sphere, considering that it’ll get people to spend more time using Gmail and arguably takes aim at Facebook Chat.  It also happens to stem from some similar improvements made on Orkut not too long ago.

A post on the Google Talkabout Blog announced this afternoon, "Starting today, you can share photos, documents, and other files while chatting in iGoogle and orkut.  To give it a try, just click Send a file… in the Actions menu while chatting with a friend (no download required):"

That should come in handy for a few folks.  What’s more interesting, though, is that Lizhen Wang, a software engineer at Google, also stated, "We’re working on bringing it to Gmail as well, and we’ll keep you posted when that happens!"

That may happen soon, too.  Gmail has millions and millions of users who depend on every component to work reliably, of course, but Orkut has millions and millions of users worldwide (it’s extremely popular in India and Brazil), meaning Wang and the other engineers Google’s assigned to this job have already scaled up the feature quite a lot.

We’ll be sure to report back when the implementation takes place.

It’s not for everybody. Anybody can use it, but not everybody wants to talk to random strangers. A lot of people still don’t "get" Twitter. If ChatRoulette grows that big, it’s going to have just as many, if not more people questioning the point of its existence. Still, people are flocking to it. There is a market for this kind of thing.

We signed on and talked to a number of people to try and gage the interest of ChatRoulette’s users. Why exactly are they using this site, and what are they hoping to accomplish? Is it just killing time? Are they looking for friends? Romance?

One person told us they just use it to meet people for fun. "If I’m bored or something," they said. They said they have had a few interesting conversations with strangers, but some of it has been "some disgusting guys showing their d****."  (Note: Beware that if you start using the site, you may be blindsided by stuff like this)

"They got to stop…it’s annoying," this person tells us. And they’ve only been using it for a week. Actually, some of the attention ChatRoulette has been getting has been based on this kind of obscene behavior. Chatroulette clearly says on its home page that it "does not tolerate broadcasting obscene, offending, pornographic material, and we will have to block users who violate these rules from using our service," but that does not stop people from using it for those purposes.

A Huffington Post article likens the service to "inviting pedophiles into your home." Scary stuff, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t potential for cleaning the site up. The guy who runs the site is only seventeen years old, and there has already been interest expressed from investors. This thing could become much bigger in time, and managed more thoroughly.

That’s not to take anything away from founder Andrey Ternovskiy. Policing such a site would be a burden for most, and he’s clearly a quite knowledgeable kid. He started ChatRoulette for fun and has been coding since the age of 11. He talked a good deal about his background to the New York Times. According to that article, the site gets "about 20,000 users on a typical night."

One could envision ChatRoulette utilizing a traditional social media model, where people can follow (or friend) one another, but for right now, it’s just random. It’s kind of like a video chat version of StumbleUpon, without the personalization features. There is plenty of potential for features to be added in the future though, and perhaps better management of obscene behavior. This site may be one to keep an eye on.

Have you used ChatRoulette? Would you? Does it have the potential to become something really big? Share your thoughts here.