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The GMking staff is extremely geographically diverse, which makes communication and decision making processes much harder.  Many of our staff have an 8 hour or more time gap (which probably explains why some of us are such night-owls ).

How do we all stay in touch?  Easy!

• Google Chat, we all love it, and you should too.  If you have a GMail account it’s that poor little-used widget on the left side of your mailbox.  It also lets you talk to your AIM and ICQ buddies, should you have any
• Yahoo Mail has a similar feature, but for YIM and MSN contacts, which you could probably use if your team mainly used those services instead of Jabber/AIM/ICQ.
• Meebo is the all in one online instant messenger.  It supports ICQ, AIM, Jabber (GTalk too), MSN and YIM.  I use this quite often since I have a lot of contacts spread over many different networks, and I don’t want to suck up 2GB of ram with a dozen different clients (no one mention trillion!).
• Email comes in handy too, for when we need to reach someone who isn’t online just then.
• Staff Forums keep us all moving in the same director toward the same goals.

Overall, we don’t use any fancy silver-bullet solutions for our communication needs, we just apply what we already have, and use it to furnish our team environment.

Related articles you might find interesting…

• Slick IM for Windows Mobile
• Google to Connect to Other IM Networks Using Jabber Transports
• Google Talk And Windows Live Messenger 9 Get Friendly