Outlook.com now lets you chat with Google friends

Outlook.com will now allow you to chat with your Google friends in a move to try and recapture the top slot back from Google.

The last three months since Outlook.com came out of preview have been filled with releases to help make you more productive and your experience more personal. These were often based on your feedback. There's a new, modern Outlook.com calendar, a refreshed Outlook.com app for Android devices, two step verification for your account, new international domains for your email address, a preview of Skype calling in Outlook.com and deeper integration of SkyDrive directly within Outlook.com.



On an Outlook blog post it goes on to say: We believe people choose to use many different services and that our role is to help them connect to the people who matter most, wherever they are. You see this in the People experience, where you connect to your contact lists from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more. And you can already chat with your Facebook and Skype friends. But we heard that some of you who switched over from Gmail still want to chat with friends stuck on Gmail. Today, we're excited to announce that you can now also chat with your Google friends. With this feature, the next time you're reading an email from someone who uses Gmail, you can reply with a quick chat right from your Outlook.com inbox. And if you're working together on an Office document in SkyDrive, you can send an instant message to a Google contact with just a click. We're rolling out Google chat integration now, so look for it in your inbox over the next couple of days.

The result is an uncluttered contact list full of people you really know. At a glance, you can see a quick summary of a contact with information from across all those networks. And you're just one click away from common tasks like sending an email, calling a number, mapping an address, or starting a chat, on any of the services you've connected!