In case you haven’t heard, your once-favorite chat apps are going the way of the dinosaur. Yes, following the recent demise of AIM, Yahoo Messenger is saying goodbye next month, the company announced today. It’s got me thinking about my relationship with the concept of chats, especially chats in apps so intertwined in…

One of the most interesting tidbits of news to come out of Microsoft’s Build developer conference earlier this week was the company’s upcoming Your Phone app, which attempts to bridge the gap between mobile and desktop messaging by letting you send and receive texts (along with some more advanced screen sharing and…

Google, apparently unsatisfied with the already incredibly long list of short-lived communications solutions that it has produced, is taking one more shot messaging. According to The Verge, the latest attempt is called Chat.

Skype for Web makes chatting face-to-face with your aunt easier by eliminating the need to download a pesky app.

I am a huge fan of what Google Voice can do. That's why I've been calling for a mercy kill, so that its best features can thrive in something other than a limp husk of a service. And now that Google is finally beginning to merge Voice into Hangouts, the process has started in earnest. This is very good news.

Last fall, BitTorrent (the company) announced and experimental plan to build a secure chat system using the protocol that's most famous for enabling file sharing. Today, we're getting our first look at the what will eventually become a finished product: BitTorrent Bleep.

Brace yourself Google Voice fanboys, your treasured service is probably not long for this world. But don't you worry; the sooner it's dead the better we'll all be.

The fallout from the NSA spying scandal has left many people unsure about what they should and shouldn't share across the tubes. But now BitTorrent has an answer: an instant-message chat client that uses decentralized data transfer to keep your communications safe.

We can argue about Android fragmentation and conflicting standards all day long, but you know what? Those fights are nothing compared to how broken your own digital life is.

Even if it's not quite as amazing as it could be, Google Voice does some wonderful things. That's what makes it hard to admit the truth: It's time for Google Voice to die.

In many respects Google Hangouts is impressive—it brings together Google's disparate chat options rather neatly—but you should think twice about using it if you rely on making Google Voice calls from your computer.

So, Google's new Hangouts app keeps all of your chats in sync across all of your devices. Cool, right? But what if you're in a video call on your phone, and then open the same video call on your computer. Boop! Suddenly there's two of you, as I just discovered when chatting with my friend Bay.

If you try and use Google's new Hangouts app for Android on AT&T's cellular network, don't expect to video chat—because you can't.

Here's some good, good news. Microsoft is adding Google Talk (which all of you just call Gchat) support to Outlook.com. Meaning, you can use Google's chat service right through Microsoft's beautiful new(ish) webmail page. Awesome.

Real-time chat has been everywhere for, you know, forever now and has swallowed everything in its path. Integrating chat platforms and finding a way to coherently deal with texting vs. chatting has become a major issue. Other than venting here in hallowed Gizmodo chatroom posts, how do you manage all the Google chat…

For a long time now, our smartphones have been getting more and more, well, smart. They do more things. You probably haven’t beaten your phone at chess in years. And the race to cram increasingly granular, eventually useless, features into them has defined the past few years of phone making. Except the next big…