Google Chat (the in-browser chat application over at GMail) has now introduced the Group Chat feature - similar to Conferencing in Yahoo Chat. Using this feature, on can add more than one friend into a chat session and all of them can simultaneously chat with each other. There’s no limit to the number of participants a Group chat can have and anyone can invite any other person to join. That may be a bit awkward sometimes! What if someone I don’t want to have a discussion with, has been invited into the chat? I’d have to politely exit. It would have been better if the chat-starter is allowed the option of adding as well as removing users from a chat

The second feature that Google folks have added into the Chat console is ….Smileys or Emoticons. There have been visual smileys in GTalk but now they’ve added those yellow animated ones as well. What’s more, apart from the usual round-faced smileys, there are also square-shaped ones! And the entire smiley-set represents the same emotions i.e. for a tongue-out-taunt, there is one plain-jane smiley, one round-shaped yellow smiley and one square-shaped yellow smiley. Typing out the character-combos that make up the smiley also turns it into a smiley - corresponding to the type of smiley that you’ve kept selected. So if you’ve selected the round-shaped smileys tab selected and type :  ) (without the spaces, of corz) into the chat window, it will come up as

More: GMail What’s New | Google System

P.S: I dunno if the same features are available on Google Talk - the standalone chat client. Any idea?