Tech giant Google has revealed that it is pushing out a basic but crucial new feature for its instant messaging service, Google Chat.
The company’s latest blog post reveals that Google Chat and Spaces (the group chat equivalent) will soon benefit from the ability to mark messages as read or unread, on both mobile and desktop.
Google wrote in the blog post, “Marking a message as unread can help remind you to return to it later in Chat. In 1:1 and group DMs, you can mark a thread as unread starting from a particular message.”
To access this feature, users can hover over a relevant message and select the dedicated “mark as unread” button from the pop-up menu.
The new feature will be rolled out immediately but should be available to all Google account holders by early November.
Google Chat Update
Google’s messaging service has lagged behind in the competition even after the company invested plenty of energy and resources into its Workspace suite since the start of the pandemic.
Google is addressing one of the inefficiencies that separate Chat from the likes of Slack and Teams by adding the ability to mark messages as unread.
The Google Chat progressive web app (PWA) offers more flexibility and functionality than the old browser extension but it’s not as smooth as the native clients offered by other services on the market.
Moreover, as Google works to deliver new synergies between Chat and its other products like — Drive, Meet, Calendar etc, the service does not benefit from a deep range of third-party integrations in the same way others do.
Recently, Google declared that it will increase its investment in the Workspace app marketplace, with a view of helping customers squeeze more value from its productivity software. All the signs suggest Google is aware of these shortcomings.
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