An interesting new feature

I have had a Gmail account for a long time. Back when I signed up, you needed to have an existing member invite you. My first email sent was in Sept. of 2004 and I have never looked back to other email accounts. One thing about Gmail, as with many other services that Google puts its name on, is that it constantly gets better and better. The newest feature of Gmail is the invisible status feature and I absolutely love it. If you haven't heard of it, let me explain. Imagine that you love chatting through your email page. However, every once in a while it may be the case that you have contacts you would rather not know that you are online. The reasons could be manifold: a contact you recently went on an awkward date with, a time-consuming chatter when you're really busy, a contact you struggle to love, etc. We all have these kind of moments, don't we? The red busy signal doesn't do the job either. It is overused by some, makes your name look evil, and is frankly intimidating even when someone needs to communicate with you. Well, if you want to spend time inside your email your only other option was to sign out of chat completely. (See options under the pull-down menu by your name) But now there is the invisibility feature. Under such a status, you appear offline to everyone, but you can see all of your contacts who are online. What's even better, you can start conversations with them. In this way you can selectively choose who you want to communicate with, without worrying about GChat drama. The fun part is that the way Google set this feature up, someone can initiate a chat with a contact who is invisible, its just a matter of guessing if they are invisible or truly offline. Obviously it would not be proper chat etiquette to constantly be invisible, but as I've been using it for the past couple days, it feels good to be under the radar.