Whenever Google Babel does arrive for public consumption, we’re starting to believe it will be everything we have ever asked for in a unified messenger service. We’re talking synced notifications, cross-platform conversation experiences, a new UI, photo sharing, quick access to live video chats, and on-the-record chat history viewing from anywhere. According to sources of ours who have shared new information with us (including a feature list), we’re getting all of this and more. 

After we first outed the name Google Babel last week, and the new unified chat app by Google hit internal testers, we figured it was only a matter of time before the first shots of it emerged. Thanks to TechRadar, those first shots may have arrived today. Someone tell Google that the 90s want their emoticons back. 

According to sources who spoke with Geek.com, Google is readying a unified chat client called “Babble” that will merge Google Talk, Google+ Messenger, Voice, and any other platform used to send messages across their services. The goal for Babble is to overtake platforms like iMessage and Blackberry Messenger, which none of its separate parts have been able to do thus far. 

Developer Francois Beaufort, the guy who first pointed out that Chrome would be receiving Google Now-like notifications, posted up the screenshot you are seeing above to his G+ account, today. In the shot, we are seeing at least two things that have grabbed our attention – rich notifications in Chrome OS and an icon that looks a lot like one that would be for a messenger client of sorts. 

After a brief outage, that most of us on the west coast slept through, Google Talk appears to be returning for many users. In fact, as I crawled out of bed in the last few minutes, I watched my contact list tick from everyone offline to most being back online.

Here is the most recent status report that was last updated at 6:50AM. I would guess that it will be changing shortly if the Google team did indeed fix the issue. Is it back up for you? 

The concept of “floating” apps has become the hot thing in the Android tablet realm over the last few weeks, something we think is awesome. With all of that screen real estate on tablets, why not use some of it to take advantage of Android’s multi-tasking? LilyPad HD is the newest on the block, but claims to be the first to float in an instant messenger environment. Currently only working with Google Talk (perfect for Android gurus), this app allows you to open chat windows over top of whatever you may be doing, which means chatting while watching videos or cruising the web without having to toggle screens. 

A reader turned me onto an interesting Associated Press article that focused on the state of the free instant messaging/texting world and how much money carriers have been losing because of it. In 2011 alone, carriers saw a decrease in profits of around $14 billion dollars as consumers have moved onto Blackberry Messenger, iMessage, Google Talk and other services that can send messages using data instead. Before you feel too bad for them, know that they reportedly still took in an estimated $153 billion from text messages. A 9% decrease year-over-year is pretty massive though. Carriers are now looking to creating their own solutions on this front so that they can hopefully help save this particular cash cow industry before it’s gone for good.

So this all got us wondering – how do you interact with friends and family?  Through the dinosaur method text messaging or with a free instant messaging/texting service?

*Note – We would include Google Voice in the “instant messaging” category since it’s free and is an alternative to standard text messaging.

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Cheers @kaufkin!

Update:  Ignore my sleepiness.  Video chatting on GTalk was definitely all over the Honeycomb preview video. We just got extra excited when we saw it in a press release.  Now we’ll set our sites on it coming to Gingerbread.  Move along!

LG and T-Mobile slipped up a little bit in their press release for the G-Slate by giving away the fact that Honeycomb will definitely allow for video chatting through Google Talk.  We know that Google’s Honeycomb event today is going to feature additional details for their tablet OS that we had yet to see, but this was something that had only been rumored up to this point.

Here is the piece from their presser:

With the front-facing camera, customers can video chat with friends and family over T-Mobile’s network or Wi-Fi with Google Talk™.

This was a feature we were crossing our fingers for, and thanks to LG, we can relax.  Now, back to focusing our good thoughts on a new browser-based market and Google Music.  Make sure to be here around 10AM for coverage!