{"id":190826,"date":"2022-05-17T09:57:42","date_gmt":"2022-05-17T07:57:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sftarticles.wpenginepowered.com\/en\/?p=190826"},"modified":"2025-07-01T20:45:28","modified_gmt":"2025-07-02T03:45:28","slug":"google-chat-idle-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/google-chat-idle-update\/","title":{"rendered":"Google is bringing back an uncomfortable feature to Google Chat"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Working from Home very much feels like a new type of normal. The Covid-19 pandemic forced many of us to log on to work at home and now many of us don\u2019t want to give up the added convenience it offers. However, if your job uses the Google Workspace<\/a> ecosystem you may start to squirm a little when you hear about an old feature that the internet giant looks set to reintroduce to Google Chat.<\/p>\n\n\n

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You will probably remember older messenger apps like MSN Messenger having availability status updates<\/strong> that would tell other users whether you were present on your device or not. These would include automatic statuses like Active or Away. Well, it now looks like Google is going to bring back something similar to Google Chat<\/strong> in the form of the Idle icon<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google announced the update in a recent Google Workspace blog post<\/a>. When it rolls out to users, anybody who has been inactive in Gmail or Google Chat for five minutes<\/strong> or more will get an Idle icon displayed just under their names<\/strong>. Rather than this feature being introduced to help bosses spy on their employees, Google says it is to make it \u201ceasier to determine the best time to connect with your colleagues.\u201d<\/em> Either way, if you are a bit of a slacker at work you will have to move your mouse at least once every five minutes if you don\u2019t want to show up as Idle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This marks another update to the Google Workspace<\/strong> ecosystem that sees Google attempting to catch up with Microsoft\u2019s Office<\/a> productivity suite<\/strong>. Microsoft Teams<\/a> has had these status availability icons active for a long time now already. With more and more people working from home, it is clear that there is a battle going on between the software giant to try and gain as much of a share of that business as possible. We recently reported that Google Docs was also getting some productivity-boosting features<\/a> designed to attract the attention of businesses and offices. As already mentioned, however, Google has a lot of catching up to do in that respect but is clearly taking the mission seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google also recently gave Google Docs two new team-focused features<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Working from Home very much feels like a new type of normal. The Covid-19 pandemic forced many of us to log on to work at home and now many of us don\u2019t want to give up the added convenience it offers. However, if your job uses the Google Workspace ecosystem you may start to squirm … Continue reading “Google is bringing back an uncomfortable feature to Google Chat”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9073,"featured_media":190837,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","wpcf-pageviews":1},"categories":[1015],"tags":[3454],"usertag":[],"vertical":[],"content-category":[],"class_list":["post-190826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-app-subdomain-redirectionhangouts-chat"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9073"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190826"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":323906,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190826\/revisions\/323906"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/190837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190826"},{"taxonomy":"usertag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/usertag?post=190826"},{"taxonomy":"vertical","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/vertical?post=190826"},{"taxonomy":"content-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/content-category?post=190826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}