Open chat session with specific user?

[furby]

It's easy to pop up the HTML/Javascript Google Talk client in a
separate window... but is there a way to not pop up the whole client
and instead directly open a chat with a specific user? I'm trying to
use the google latitude "API" (Which is really the Latitude Badge
code) to plot a few users on a map (Which i do already), click on
their marker and then choose "Chat" from the infowindow to pop
directly to a chat with them....

[Moishe Lettvin]

Not yet, but that is a planned feature.

Do you want to open just chats, or would you want to also open realtime gadgets with a particular user?

[Timothy Collins]

Really just a chat (In a floating div or a popup window - I am not
picky on that).... Supposedly using a link that starts with
"gtalk:chat?jid=" was supposed to work, but my browsers constantly
complain that they can't handle that protocol, so I assume that option
is not gonna work (if pressed i could make it work on my machine, but
I am not going to visit each computer individually to make it work...
sort of destroys the whole idea of chat).

Any idea when the feature will be implemented?

[Moishe Lettvin]

Yeah, gtalk:chat only works if you have the googletalk.exe installed, which also sets up a protocol handler.

Way easier to do a popup window when we do add this functionality, though you could make a floating div containing an iframe pointed to the popout url if you want to get fancy.