After so many bad news coming in from Mountain View, such as accepting censorship in order to be granted entrance on the Chinese Internet market and removing bmw.de from its databases, Google finally drops a good one.

In fact, �good� is not the right word, �innovative� should be more appropriate. Since the instant messaging market is extremely crowded and Google Talk has not succeeded to grab too much of Yahoo�s or MSN�s market share, Google�s engineers have come up with a new concept: chat within e-mail.

Users who have a GMail account and access the service�s front page will be greeted by a new message in the left-side of the screen, which says that "Chat is coming soon".

Once the account is accessed, you will notice in the left-side a new button, called Chats. Currently, the service is not fully operational, the only available feature being the ability to save chats from GTalk in the e-mail account.

If you think that once this feature is implemented in the e-mail service, you won�t need the application anymore, Google�s representatives warn that without GTalk, there won�t be any VoIP calls and advise users to employ both.

They also say that for now, only the IE 6.0+ and Firefox 1.0+ browsers and the solutions based on them can be used to benefit from the mail chat, but that they are working for the compatibility with the rest.

"We are breaking down some of the artificial barriers between e-mail and Web browsing. We observed by talking with our users that there is no reason to think of IM as different from an e-mail message," Salar Kamangar, Google's vice president of product management, told Reuters in a phone interview.