Tech Talk

Google will launch a new feature as early as this week to make sharing media and updates with friends easier, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The new module, which will be integrated into Gmail, is intended to make the e-mail application “more social” by allowing users to “view a stream of status updates from people they choose,” the newspaper reported.

The new feature seems to expand off of the Google Talk application currently integrated into Gmail. 

I regularly update my Google Talk statuses to reflect what I am doing, and utilize the application to communicate with friends and colleagues — as I once did on AOL Instant Messenger.

The difference, according to the Journal, is that the development will include an area where users can sift through a stream of updates — that includes the Google-owned YouTube and Picasa services —  in a similar timeline view as on Twitter and Facebook.  It remains uncertain if updates from non-Google entities will be included.

If the development goes across networks, Mashable notes:

[T]he new features could be thought of more like a TweetDeck or Seesmic, looking to provide an aggregate view of your friends’ social media activities along with the ability to push status updates to the services you use from inside of Gmail. If not, it could be thought of as a major competitor to Twitter and Facebook as Gmail looks to covert its millions of email users into users of a whole new breed of social media service.