Gmail users will soon have more ways to keep up with their friends via a widget that shows quick status updates like Facebook and Twitter do, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The move would further turn Gmail, which revolutionized online e-mail, into a comprehensive communications hub. The intent is to keep people’s attention centered on Google, by making Gmail, not Facebook, people’s first stop online — and their default place to send and receive messages. Gmail users can already chat via Jabber or AIM, make video calls, and send SMS messages from Gmail’s web interface.The full extent of the new features remain unclear, but Google is inviting reporters to a launch event Tuesday on its Mountain View campus promising “some innovations in two of our most popular products,” according to an e-mail sent to reporters.
Yahoo has included similar features in its e-mail service, letting users see what photos their contacts have uploaded to Flickr, for example.Google could integrate updates from a user’s Twitter account, since most of that is public. And it could likely make it easy for Gmail users to post to Twitter as well, due to Twitter’s liberal API policy.Facebook, however, will not likely let its rival re-publish status updates, or allow users to publish to their Facebook pages through Gmail. Facebook, much like AOL and Compuserve back in the early 90s, is a controlled and sanitized version of the larger internet, but it relies on closed protocols.
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