Google Talking in the iChat Theatre

Ever wanted to play some video remotely for a friend over chat, but think .Mac is Apple’s worst invention since Phil Schiller’s mullet? Well you can if you’re a Mac user with Leopard and have a Google Mail account!

Simply enter your Google account info into iChat Preferences, invite your similarly-configured friend to video chat, and you’re off.

The first time I tried it, I showed a friend travelling overseas the intro to the season premiere of LOST he had missed.

View enlarged. If that ain’t glee, I don’t know what is.

It also works with things less exciting than season premieres like images, and PDF files, etc. I have not gotten it to work with screen sharing yet, although video and audio chat has worked since at least Tiger.

TIP: If you had a .Mac account back when Apple promised, sorry strongly implied, that e-mail would be for life, it may still work in iChat. Mine does. If yours does, you’ll be able to do a few things you can’t do with your Gtalk account like File Transfers.