just an asterisk

Sometimes a good tip is worth sharing, even if it’s not really large enough for a full post. Blog fashion police be damned, I’m writing it anyway.

SMS (also known as texting) stands for short message service and has become more popular in the US than calling, a fact that was a surprisingly long time coming.  Although we’ve finally caught on to the trend, messages are still rather expensive if you don’t have an unlimited plan or are sending/receiving while out of country. Well there is a small solution built write into your Gmail account that you might not have found yet. Here are the steps to send text messages straight from Google talk!

The first step is to enable texting from your Gmail Account.  To change this, head to the little green flask next to settings.  This should bring up the “labs features”.

Scroll down to the labs feature “Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat” and enable it.

Now head over to your Google Talk window (you might need to log out and then log back in).  When you put your mouse over a contact, you will see a “video & more” menu.  From there you can choose “Send SMS”.

If this is the first time you are sending a message to this contact, you will be prompted for a phone number.  Plug it in phone and click save.

Now you can chat via SMS! The recipient will receive a message from Google, but when they reply, it will appear in the chat window!!!

Now that is pretty cool…

Enjoy!

~ab

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 17th, 2010 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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