Google Chat, the company's latest messaging app, is now open to everyone.

And Gmail's big merger with Google Chat, Google Docs, and Google Meet (Google's Zoom competitor) is also coming to consumer accounts.

In August, this change started rolling out to paid Google Workspace accounts, and it has experimentally appeared on some consumer accounts.

If someone pastes a Google Docs link into Google Chat, you can mouse over the thumbnail and click "Open in Chat," which will open the Google Doc inside a new, multipane interface inside Gmail, with your navigation sidebar on the left.

"Open in Chat" seems like an odd name for this button since it's opening the document inside Gmail.com, but this split-screen interface does not actually work if you receive the link via email.

Hiding the unified Gmail interface behind the "Google Chat" flag doesn't make a ton of sense, but you can check this box by going to settings -> "Chat and Meet" and flipping the "Chat" setting from "Classic Hangouts" to "Google Chat." If you hate the idea of all this extra stuff inside Gmail, you can turn the "Chat" setting to "Off" and the Google Meet setting to "hide." That should give you regular Gmail.

The original Google Talk user base from 2005 was upgraded to Google Hangouts in 2013, and now those Google Hangouts users will be upgraded to Google Chat at some point.

Google Chat is already cross-compatible with Google Hangouts—your contacts and messages in one app will show up in the other—Google just needs to kick users off the old Hangouts clients and get them running on the new Google Chat clients.

Presumably, we'll eventually see prompts in the old Hangouts clients to switch to Google Chat, while Google Hangouts will finally undergo the promised shutdown that has been delayed several times now.

I've had early access to Google Chat for a while now, and if you're wondering what the difference is between the old Google Hangouts and the new Google Chat, the answer is "not much." That's actually a good thing.

Google Chat is functionally the same as Hangouts.

Plus, unlike Hangouts, Google Chat will keep running for the foreseeable future.

Today (along with the announcement post), Google showed off another new Gmail interface and a new Google Chat feature called "Spaces." Meanwhile, Spaces gets a separate blog post all to itself.

The update sounds like a revamp to Google Chat's group chat feature, which used to be called "Rooms" and from now on will be called "Spaces." (Google already had a product called "Spaces"—it was a messaging app that launched in 2016 and was shut down eight months later.).