Chat ou email, que'est-ce que la diffarence?
A curiously interesting French philosopher who you imagine must be spending weeks in dark libraries yet is not out of place taking action in the streets of Paris could not have said it better than Gmail does it: email messages and instant messages are both, well, messages and can be treated alike.
In Gmail, you can chat with anybody connected to the Google Talk network through either Gmail, Google Talk proper or another Jabber Instant Messaging client. Conversations are automatically archived, indexed and appearing next to email exchanges (unless you go "off the record", of course).
