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Posts tagged google talk
Google Apps Status Dashboard Released
Feb 26th
Gmail had a major outage early Tuesday morning: for about two and a half hours starting at 1:30 am PST while many of their users in the US were asleep, many people couldn’t access their email. Lots of people around the world who rely on Gmail were disrupted during their waking and working hours.
In response to its extended outage, Google has just launched the Google Apps Status Dashboard. The dashboard offers an at-a-glance look at the system health of most popular Google services, including Gmail, Google Calendar, and the company’s suite of web-based document editors. Google has been pretty good about responding to down time with blog posts alerting users with status updates, but having a dedicated page seems like a much better solution (especially for users who don’t follow Google’s blogs).
As you can see above the dashboard lists most of Google popular services, a date range (you can view older date ranges as well) and an icon displaying the status for the individual service. The status icon will indicate: No issues, Service Disruption, Service Outage, and Information Available. Clicking the symbol in the table will allow you to view more detailed information. There’s also an RSS Feed icon shown on the page, however… it says “Coming Soon”. This too would be handy, unless you’re using Reader of iGoogle to fetch your feeds and one of those services is down as well.
Chat With Your Site’s Visitors Using Google Talk
Feb 26th
The most excellent site GoogleSystem has a write up on how to enable you to chat with your site’s visitors using Google Talk.
Google Talk’s gadget was a nice addition, but you couldn’t use it to chat with unknown people or with the visitors of the site, like in Meebo Me. Now you can do that using the new chatback badges. You only need to add some code to your site and anyone could click on the generated badge to chat with you.
“A Google Talk chatback badge allows others to chat with you even if they haven’t signed up for Google Talk or a Google Account. You can put the badge in your blog or website, and people who visit those pages can chat with you. The badge will display your online status (whether you’re available to chat or not) and, optionally, your status message.”
If someone clicks on the badge, a special version of the Google Talk gadget will open and he will be able to chat with you.
The conversations are private and only one-to-one, so other visitors won’t be able to read them. For some strange reason, they’re not even added in Gmail’s chat section. Unfortunately, being constantly interrupted by other people is not very pleasant, so you can disable the link from your badge by setting your status to “busy” or by signing out of Google Talk.
I’ve put this in place on my site to test it out. It was extremely simple to enable, just scroll down to the bottom of the page and look in the About Me section and you’ll see my Google Talk badge!