More musings on GMail as a IM...

Well, I started thinking on this. Why do I use GMail as an IM ? First, Its damn fast. Secondly, other mails are slow. (Well, thats not very illuminating but..thats what I call Logic). And why GMail is so fast ? Sometimes the most trivial looking technology turns out to be a trump-card. The deceptively simple technology behind GMail's lightening fast responses is AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript + XML). Just look at what Google has done with AJAX in Google-Maps. The magic of AJAX is that the page is rendered partially...only the form elements that needs to be refreshed are refreshed and refreshed by good old Javascript. Browser does the dirty work without doing a costly trip to Hawaii (read, Webserver).
Read more on AJAX : Here, here, and here.