Google’s release of its Gmail Video service is noteworthy for several reasons. It is integrated into the Gmail console, adding voice and video services to the realtime console that is being built out around XMPP. It is remarkably easy to use; Dan Farber just called to test the service and I popped the window out and continued chatting with him while returning to this post. Several alerts on Yammer and Friendfeed’s realtime IM competed briefly in other chat windows. Oh, and Google just added about a quarter of its version of Silverlight to my MacBook Air. Call it Silverlite.

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