I’d like to extend congratulations out to all my friends over on the Google chat team. They just announced a set of improvements to the web based chat clients in both iGoogle and Orkut. If you haven’t been there in a while, Orkut is Google’s original social networking site that was born around the time of Friendster and Myspace. Orkut is incredibly popular in Brazil, so much so that some Brazilians equate Orkut with the internet. It has a bunch of really neat social networking features, one of which is the tightly integrated chat system which was my starter project at Google. It’s great to see file transfer working entirely in the browser in both iGoogle and Orkut, to compliment the impressive video chat capabilities that were already there. The chat system is based on XMPP, so it federates with any other chat system based on the open standard, including obviously all of Google’s other chat-enabled services like Gmail and the original Google Talk client.
Great job everybody! It’s awesome to see what you can do without leaving your browser.