Ear­lier this week I added this Mac Mini Server, which I named Fron­tier, to my home net­work. It’s a bit strange after so many years of work­ing with Macs, and help­ing to admin­is­ter Win­dows and Linux servers, but this is actu­ally my first Mac server!

I got it pri­mar­ily as a file server for scanned pho­tos, but I’ve also enabled the iChat Server, which is Apple’s front end for the pop­u­lar XMPP server jab­berd. The idea is that once I’ve got some DNS stuff straight­ened out I’ll finally have the same address for instant mes­sages that I do for email.

Almost new in Labs: SMS Text Mes­sag­ing for chat. Posted by Leo Dirac, Prod­uct Manager

Oh snap. Last night, we started rolling out a new fea­ture to Gmail Labs that lets you send SMS text mes­sages right from Gmail. It com­bines the best parts of IM and tex­ting: you chat from your com­puter and reach your friends no mat­ter where they are. Your friends who are away from their com­put­ers get your mes­sages as texts and can peck out replies on their lit­tle key­boards. It was pretty cool for a few min­utes last night when we were sit­ting around tex­ting each other.

Then we found a glitch. When you’d try to turn it on, it wouldn’t fully enable. We thought about keep­ing it out there — bugs and all — but the expe­ri­ence wasn’t that great. So, in the spirit of Labs, we’ve pulled SMS chat back to fix it, and we’ll get it back out to you as soon as it’s ready — prob­a­bly within 2 weeks, so stay tuned. [Offi­cial Gmail Blog]

I guess that answers the ques­tion of whether it works bet­ter than AIM.

OMG! Gmail Adds SMS Chat. Gmail added mobile SMS mes­sag­ing to its embed­ded chat Thurs­day evening. When turned on, the fea­ture allows you to text your con­tacts from your desk­top to their mobile phones and back, pro­vided they can afford the texts under their mobile provider’s plan. SMS is yet another exten­si­ble fea­ture Gmail has added through its Labs sec­tion in the last cou­ple weeks. [Wired News]

This is already pos­si­ble via AIM, but replies from a phone to AIM are some­what unre­li­able. Hope­fully the Gmail ver­sion will work better.