New York magazine reports that Google is getting ready to kill off one of its most beloved features: Google Talk (or, as it’s more colloquially known, Gchat), the little conversational window lurking like a time-devouring landmine on the side of every Gmail session. The service’s main chat functionality will be taken over by Google Hangouts, which the company rolled out a few years ago, and which have slowly become the center of its social messaging tools.
Still, we’ll miss old-school Gchat, the inescapable, weirdly intimate chat medium that could always be plausibly passed off as “checking emails,” and, thus, work. Google will formally kill the unofficial “AIM-for-grown-ups” off in June.
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