I just noticed. The google gmail chat feature is now activated. You can see on your left panel the status of gmail account holders in your address book.
Well I think the point of it is so that it is more like Yahoo, which has the call option in the e-mail (I believe). Unfortunately, it's more annoying than anything else.
yeah I do notice that the pop-ups are really annoying me. If only they created a system where they filed the users under different categories of offline/online state. Like they have in normal instant message chats.