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Google has just added an awesome new feature to Gmail. It allows you to send a Text message to anybody’s phone using the Chat feature in Gmail.

It’s only available for cell phones in the United States right now, but you can send texts to your friends with US phone numbers from anywhere in the world. You can start by just typing a phone number into the search box in the chat window on the left, then select “Send SMS.” You can also select the contact you want to SMS first and then add their phone number

Google will save your friends’ numbers in your Contacts, so next time you can just type their name in the chat box and select Send SMS. The reply gets routed back to Gmail’s servers and shows up in your friend’s Gmail chat window. Each of your friends’ messages will come from a different 406 number so you can reply to any message and it will get back to the right person. Messages from the same person will always come from the same number, so you can even bookmark it in your phone.

Just click on Settings, and go to the Labs tab. Scroll down until you see “Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat” and select Enable and Save Changes.

Google Inc. made a deal with Life Magazine to host an online photo gallery that will feature millions of images from Life magazine’s archives that have never been seen by the public before. http://images.google.com/hosted/life is now hosting over 2 million images stretching back to 1750. Google is still in the process of scanning in the 10 million pictures from Life’s archives.  Life has said that more than 95 percent of its photo archive has never been publicly viewed or published in the magazine.

“This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” Google software engineer Paco Galanes wrote on Google’s blog.

Life’s archive contains images of nearly every memorable moment in modern history, including notable names like Joe DiMaggio, John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Charles Lindbergh, and world- changing events like the war in Vietnam, the World’s Fair and the 1930s oil boom. The archive also includes the famed Zapruder film of President Kennedy’s assassination, which may be Life’s most iconic photo, and the image of an American sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on Aug. 14, 1945.