How do you set up Gmail chat?

Gchat statuses on the iPhone/iPod Touch vs. Gmail

• In regular Gmail, my friends' chat statuses show up as red, green, or greyed out. I know that if they're greyed out it might be because they're not signed in or because they've gone invisible. In Gchat on the iPhone/iPod Touch, there's a little more variation in how their statuses appear (not on the list at all, greyed out without profile pic, greyed out with profile pic) and I'm looking to understand whether those variations tell me if they're there but "invisible" vs "signed out." There seem to be a couple of variations for how my friends appear in Gchat on my iPhone and I'd like to know what each variation means for whether they're really there or not. If their chat status is set to red or green, things are pretty obvious but I've noticed three possible variants when it's not set to either of those. 1. They don't appear in the list of chattable people at all. Nothing, nada, no listing. 2. They appear greyed out but without a profile picture, just the default silhouette (and these are people with profile pictures set up). 3. They appear greyed out but with their profile picture visible. Does anyone know on what basis one of these occurs rather than another? If the profile picture is visible but they're greyed out, does it mean they're there but "invisible"? If they're not listed at all, does it mean they're signed out? Anyone know? My real question is less about where my friends are than about what my own chat status might be communicating.

• Answer:

  I'm a little confused — in my Gchat, there are four options: Red, green, greyed out or yellow (for idle). I've found that on my iPhone, Gchat sometimes doesn't show people who are idle or not online, generally hiding the people I talk to less often. Sometimes it goes into jerk mode and hides people I do talk to that are idle, though. I've never thought the presence or absence of a profile picture made any difference in Gchat — this could be a glitch, but the pictures tend to randomly disappear for me, so I've never really thought they indicated anything. But I'm not a huge fan of the Google Talk app (I'm assuming that's what you're using). I usually use it through the browser, so maybe it's a little different. Have you thought about signing on through both your iPhone & computer and comparing?