We haven’t heard about Google and their mail client for a while, but now they’ve come out and announced a feature that will put a big smile on many faces. When socializing with your friends with Gmail Chat, you no longer have to leave the conversation to watch the video link they’ve just sent you, because it will be displayed directly in the chat window. The only drawback is that the new feature works only with YouTube and Google Video links.

As Software Engineer with Gmail, Jessan Hutchison-Quillian puts it, it can be very frustrating to talk to somebody in Gmail chat, send that person a video, and then just wait around because he is watching the video and is unable to respond or is just too caught up in the video that he does not notice your messages. Thanks to this new feature, which by the way has been an integral part of the Google Talk Gadget for quite some time now, you can do both: watch the video and chat.

This is all very nice if your chat partner is in front of the computer, but what if he decides to go for a walk? You will not remain “unchatisfied” because Google has long ago figured a solution – just send SMS messages from Gmail chat to your buddy’s phone; when he replies you will get the message directly into Gmail chat.

Google is not the only company to tweak and improve their mail client. Yahoo! Mail is currently employing thousands of computers linked together to make up one supercomputer which would provide better spam protection for Yahoo! users, and AOL Mail has launched a new platform that allows users to turn on all sorts of 3rd party apps, as well as integrate Yahoo! Mail and Gmail into their AOL client (read all about it here).