Fly Under the IM Radar With Gmail’s New ‘Invisible’ Setting
Google has rolled out a new “invisible” setting for the GTalk chat client used in Gmail. Setting your status to invisible allows you to login and see who is online, but your contacts can’t see you. Unlike the offline setting, however, you can initiate a chat with your contacts even though they can’t see you.
Perhaps less welcome, your contacts can also still initiate a chat with you, though the fact that you don’t appear in their list of online contacts may discourage them from doing so.
The invisible mode is a nice addition to Gmail’s Talk component (one that many desktop-based chat clients have long offered) and it works with your AIM contacts in addition to Gmail contacts, but there’s still room for improvement.
The fact that the feature is only available in Gmail makes it rather confusing. Google Talk doesn’t support invisible (neither the desktop client nor the gadget) which means if you use both, invisible won’t work (the setting on the desktop client will override the one in Gmail). At this point there are now three distinct UIs for the GTalk network all of which have different features — not exactly the unified experience many are looking for.
Given that the “invisible” mode seems to try to get around the problem of IM as an unwelcome distraction, it would be more useful (though potentially even more confusing to use) if you you could apply the setting only to certain individuals or groups. For instance, you might want to be visible to your co-workers and invisible to friends while at work and then the opposite in your off time.
Then there’s a social issue, if everyone uses invisible then the whole point of IM starts to fade — if IM is a distraction for you, logging out might be the answer.
[via Google Operating System]
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