Geodog

Getting rid of that pesky GTalk box in Gmail

Over at Kevin Burton's blog, he asked how to get rid of that pesky GTalk box in Gmail that has been driving him (and me) crazy. A helpful commenter pointed out that there is a setting hidden at the bottom of the gmail page, down next to the lack of privacy policy, that allows you to do turn chat off, standard without chat. How like Google to try and hide the preference, kinda like refusing to put a delete button in for a year in spite of user demand and utility. It seems like every day Google is getting farther away from its roots in usability.

Also, is anyone else seeing a lot of these?

It used to be unheard of. Google used to be the gold standard in uptime, but it seems like they are slipping.