Google Talk Now Allows us to Leave Offline Messages

The much awaited feature from Google Talk is now out. We can now send offline messages to anyone in our contact list!!

Till now, when we send a message to someone not signed in, an error is displayed stating: "<email address> is offline and can't receive messages right now." But now we can send messages to our friends though they are not signed in.The message from Google talk appears like this "<your friend> is offline. You can still send this person messages and they will receive them the next time they are online."

The great thing about this new feature is, the offline messages sent to us can also be viewed in our gmail account. However offline messages won’t work if the recipient hasn’t enabled chat history. What's happening here exactly is, the offline messages written by us are sent directly to the recipient's gmail account and will be stored in the chat history. However if we disable chat history there is no way the messages get stored. So, ensure that your chat history is enabled.

This is how it appears if the offline messages are viewed in our Gmail account

Now Yahoo will be a bit worried.