Siddharth Abbineni

Hide friends’ status in GMail chat

Tips

February 25th, 2010

If you are wondering why your friends list in GMail chat is suddenly showing friends’ status messages, wonder no longer! You are not alone. With Google concentrating on useless new stuff like buzz, wave etc, they seem to have forgotten what the users really want.

As I value screen space more than gold, I hate it when status messages show up and bloat my list size to twice its original size. Most people think that this is the aftermath of Google’s new Buzz. Well, no actually, this happens because the setting to hide the statuses isn’t an inbuilt feature in Google Chat, but is a Google Labs feature. Its called Muzzle and Google have silently removed it from the Labs database, along with it some other features listed here [Gmail Labs graduation and retirement]. I can understand when they say they want to clean up, but keeping the Back to Beta feature which just adds a beta label to GMail and eliminating Muzzle seems utterly stupid.

The only solution that I have found so far is to use a greasemonkey script which will hide the statuses and make it behave normally. You can find it here [GMail Muzzle Lab Reviving]. If you are not familiar with scripts read this [Installing Scripts]. I will update this post when there is a better alternative to this.

Google Chat with Status messages

Google Chat without Status messages

11 Responses to “Hide friends’ status in GMail chat”

1. Hide friends' status in GMail chat | Siddharth Abbineni Type
   on February 26th, 2010 at 0:20 said :

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2. 

   csiga00
   on February 26th, 2010 at 4:25 said :

   Thanks! I’ve just noticed that status-misery, tried to google how to hide status and found your page! I’m glad to hear that other people find it annoying too…and there is a solution at least :)

   Regards,
   csiga00

3. 

   generic cialis
   on February 26th, 2010 at 5:39 said :

   I added your blog to bookmarks. And i’ll read your articles more often!

4. 

   lalli
   on February 26th, 2010 at 7:54 said :

   Dude!That helps..was annoyed of the removal of Muzzle..

5. 

   Amit
   on February 26th, 2010 at 10:29 said :

   Good job Sid !

6. 

   CM
   on February 26th, 2010 at 21:31 said :

   Thanks so much! I’d never used greasemonkey but was able to install both greasemonkey and your scripts in < 1 min.

7. 

   Mayur
   on February 27th, 2010 at 9:10 said :

   Thanks a lot!

8. 

   gero
   on March 4th, 2010 at 4:32 said :

   Thanks man. Good job. It was a fail removing Muzzle and it’s great that there was someone who gave us back this tweak.

9. 

   Sendil
   on March 5th, 2010 at 2:13 said :

   Realy useful stuf. thanks fr u share.

10. 

    Emo Chat
    on March 25th, 2010 at 14:10 said :

    This was kewl =) count me in for more =^__^=

11. 

    Anil
    on April 29th, 2010 at 0:00 said :

    HI..
    I m unable to access that above given link. I want to hide the status message in my buddy/chat list.
    can anybody help me.

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