Google has (finally?) added video and voice chat capa­bil­i­ties to their gmail ser­vice. To enable the ser­vice, just visit this site and down­load and install the plu­gin. You’ll have to quit your browser once it’s down­loaded before you can install it — but don’t worry, it will prompt you if you acci­dently leave Fire­fox open.

Then, it’s just a mat­ter of wait­ing for one of your con­tacts to have installed it them­selves so you can try it out!

You can tell one of your con­tacts has the video plu­gin installed because they’ll have a lit­tle video cam­era icon by their name in your con­tact list like this: