Is a Google Talk Contact Invisible?
Is a Google Talk Contact Invisible? Sometimes error messages can reveal more than they were supposed to. Rahul Bansal writes about a simple trick that helps you find out if one of your Google Talk contacts is offline or uses the invisible mode. The trick takes advantage of Google's off the record feature which lets you chat with your contacts without saving the conversations in Gmail. "Chats that have been taken off the record aren't stored in your Gmail chat history, or in the Gmail chat history of your contact. You and the person you're talking to can both see when a chat is taken off the record, and you'll be notified if off the record mode is disabled. Your off the record settings will apply whenever you chat with this person, until one of you makes a change." Let's say you want to know if your co-worker Michael is really offline. If you start a chat when he is online and select "go off the record", none of your messages will be saved in Mi...