Google Talk today added the ability for their gadget to interact with your webcam to take a picture of yourself to use as your Google Talk profile picture. A nice feature, one Apple users will recognize as being similar to the functionality of iChat – which makes me wonder, is Google Talk going to be adding video chatting soon too as well?

The ability to call (voice chat) has been in place for a while now in Google Talk and with the functions now in place to access your computer’s webcam thanks to this new feature this would seem the next logical step.

One thing that that strikes me as kind of odd is that while this new feature is only available via the Google Talk gadget, the ability to sign into AIM is only available via the Gmail Talk feature. You’d think Google would try to consolidate these changes or at the very least make their updates on one or another consistently.

Also something I just noticed is that on the Google Talk gadget links to YouTube videos in status messages are indicated with a YouTube icon – nice touch – and clicking on that link plays an embedded version of the video right within the chat window. Maybe that has been around for a bit, but it’s the first I’ve noticed it. Have I mentioned I really like Google Talk?