AIM in Gmail

by Chris Gilmer Dec 4th 2007

Today sure is the day for little Gmail tweaks. First they announced Colored Labels, and now AIM integration.

With Google's Gmail you can now chat with friends that have an AIM account through the Google Talk interface. When you sign into your AIM account through Gmail, your AIM buddies will be populated in your Contact list. Of course you need an AIM account to use this feature.

To check to see if you have a lucky account (we're sure they'll be rolling this out to all users soon) logout, then log back into your account and click on Settings, from there visit the Chat tab and look at the bottom of the list for the section named AIM. Sign in, and your ready to go.

UPDATE; TIP: Make sure you are signed into Gmail chat in order for AIM chat to be activated.

Tags: aim, chat, gmail, gmail-aim, google-talk, im, instant-message, talk

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

robotrock said 4:27PM on 12-04-2007

woot!

still not what we all wanted....aim and gchat interoperability...

j said 4:49PM on 12-04-2007

first of all, holy crap. second of all, when are they going to roll out these improvements to the googletalk client (and not just the "gadget")?

Hylic said 5:00PM on 12-04-2007

Interesting when i log in to my account using opera, the chat feature seams to have disappeared entirely (there isn't even a tab under settings for it) while under IE7 it works fine (and i see the option to log into my AIM account).Masking as Firefox brings back the chat feature but not the option under chat settings to log into AIM.

Also the colored labels don't appear under opera (even if i change them in IE)

plchan said 5:42PM on 12-04-2007

I wish they would roll out the new version of the Google Talk for Blackberry so I could chat with users from GTalk, and AIM at the same time.

What I really want is to see they include MSN chat in Gmail :)

michael said 5:59PM on 12-04-2007

If they included WLM in Gmail, that would be remarkable.

But AIM? Meh. I don't even like AIM itself, it just doesn't have a lot of features as the other IM's, annoying ads, and last but least, it's made by AOL.

Chris Carey said 7:00PM on 12-04-2007

Its only the tip of the iceberg!

http://www.noheat.com/2007/11/15/more-new-gmail-features-in-the-pipeline/

Tomer Cohen said 7:18PM on 12-04-2007

ICQ users: Be aware that this announcement can also let you connect to ICQ by supplying ICQ username instead of AIM.

I wrote about it here - http://tomercohen.com (Sorry, Hebrew only).

Richard Bailey said 12:41PM on 12-05-2007

Thanks Tomer that worked great!

Peter said 9:27PM on 12-04-2007

Works great here, Vietnamese and US English versions

Chris Carey said 11:57PM on 12-04-2007

Interesting on the ICQ, going to have to try that.

Karl said 6:02AM on 12-05-2007

I have been using that chat-client pidgin (former gaim) to do all that for a couple of years now - so what is new here with this?

Karl said 12:47PM on 12-05-2007

yes, right, aim contacts in that gtalk client - right...
note for myself: read carefully before you reply :-)

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