Gmail Labs Adds Text Messaging Feature

Gmail Labs Adds Text Messaging Feature. KTHXBAI. (Update)

We
don’t see it in our Gmail settings (yet), but Webmonkey reports that Gmail Labs has added a
very useful opt-in feature for sending text / SMS messages to mobile phones
using the built-in Chat functionality.

Update: the Labs team found
a glitch and is pushing the release
back a bit (’probably within two weeks’).

Update 2: make sure you read the open
letter the Webmail team at AOL
writes to Google. It’s supposed to be funny, I guess, but it’s really not and
quite unprofessional to boot.

Turning the option on in your Gmail account settings apparently enables you
to send an SMS as soon as you start typing a phone number into Chat’s search
box. When you enter new phone numbers, it will save the digits in your contact
entries as well. This means that when contacts go offline, the chat window will
give you the option to switch to SMS.

Our invitation for a live demo was lost in the mail, but Webmonkey has been
given a demonstration of the experimental feature by Gmail product manager Keith
Coleman and adds:

The first time you send a text message, it will appear on the person’s phone
as coming from a number in the 406 area code. Google has made several thousands
of these numbers available for Gmail users, and once a number is associated with
your account, all of the text messages you send through Gmail will come from
that number.

The 406 number works both ways, so your friend can reply to you via text
message. Also, your friend can save that number in their phone as belonging to
you, and they can even use it to initiate new chats with you.

We haven’t been able to try this out ourselves yet, but Google does list the
text messaging feature on its ‘What’s new in Gmail
Labs‘ page (only for US phones,
for now).

This is probably one of the first results we’re seeing from Google’s acquisition
of GrandCentral (dating back to June 2007
already).

No official word yet on the Gmail blog (the GrandCentral blog has been silent since last
April), but we suspect an announcement and general roll-out to follow soon.