The one field that Google still trails Yahoo! by far is that of the email services, where of the two, Yahoo! is king and Google isn't even close to being a serious runner up, when it comes to the numbers of users.

That's nothing, says Google, I'll just add some features and work my way up to the top. But by doing this, besides the latest update that added rich emoticons and group chat, the question that burns a hole through all my GMail related thoughts remains without an answer: will there be a client for Gtalk or has the project been completely dropped? Time will tell, but the time it takes them seems to be just more than bearable.

Group chat is the first addition and it can be accessed by clicking the "Group Chat" from the "Options" menu, while chatting. The next step is to enter the names of those you'd want to add and that's about it, you're in your very own chat room. All the previous functions, like chat archiving and taking the chat off the record, are also implemented and work just fine.

The smilies that have been added are actually what had been bothering me for a long time, the blasted buggers just wouldn't look pretty and there was no news update about somebody working on them. I guess it was worth it after all, they do look pretty cool now.

The button that opens the available emoticon menu is nice and fits in with the overall appearance of the chat window, and it also gives you the option to select the style of the smilies you send, old dull style or the two newer rich emoticon styles.

The feature works with GMail 2.0 and most browsers, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and Firefox 3.0 beta being the only ones that I've tested until now.

It's been 25 years and a couple of months since the first smilie face has been drawn by Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman, and look how far it's come.