“Say hello to Gmail voice and video chat” is the latest article on Gmail Official Blog posted next to the Google Software Engineer Justin Uberti’s foto, testing the new GMail plugin.

Gmail voice and video chat

Download GMail voice and video chat.

This is an interesting but normal move for Gmail. It’s interesting because they integrate this plugin with the small Gmail chat window instead of (the dead) GTalk application as every internet person could think, but in the end it’s normal because, hey!, the video-era begun couple of years ago. There was about time!

Wondering about what GTalk is doing these days, I have found in a billionsconnected.com’s article, a July 2008 Worldwide Instant Messaging Market Share charts and documents.

GTalk average market share is somewhere above 10% and only Japan and South Africa were able to pass the 20% barrier (Download PDF file). This being known, Google didn’t even tried to give a new boost to GTalk and associated the voice and video chat service directly with the Gmail service.

The idea of identifying the new voice and video chat service with Gmail was probably based also on US websites marketshare. Hitwise ranking may be considered reliable:
Rank | Website | Market Share
1. www.google.com 6.17%
2. mail.yahoo.com 4.7%
3. www.myspace.com 3.91%
4. www.yahoo.com 3.78%
5. mail.live.com 1.94%
6. www.ebay.com 1.56%
7. search.yahoo.com 1.49%
8. www.facebook.com 1.24%
9. www.msn.com 1.17%
10 www.youtube.com 0.98%
11. www.gmail.com 0.82%

Also, they took into consideration the number of Gmail users vs the number of Gtalk users.
According with USA Today, GMail had for example 91.6 million users in February 2008, numbers that put it on 3rd place, after 256.2 million (Microsoft) and 254.6 million users (Yahoo), respectively, according to researcher ComScore Media Metrix.

On the other hand GTalk has more than… died.

* more about the subject on BlogSearch.