You might have seen the new google talk chatback gadget, which allows you to embed a chat icon in your blog/website so guests can chat with you, if you’re available. The cool thing is that they don’t have to have a google account to chat with you.

The code from google comes in an iframe, which wordpress doesn’t like very much for security reasons. However, if you’re game, you can get it to work with a text widget (assuming you use widgets). Paste the code into a new text widget, surrounding it with tags to space it out a bit if you like.

Having had some fun getting php and javascript code to work in a sidebar widget, I expected this to be a lot more difficult!

First impressions: actually responding to someone takes a few steps. You get notification in a web page which wants to open a new chat window, rather than integrating with whatever form of google chat you already use. It’s slower too. Despite that, and notwithstanding the increasing need to control IM status, without getting overwhelmed by offers to chat, I like it!