Instant messengers are integral part of our life these days helping us to connect to our friends, family, coworkers and many more easily providing us many useful features to use with. These instant messengers come with many unique features with many of them related to privacy. We will talk about one of them, i.e. the invisible feature which makes people invisible from their friends or family . We will talk about this feature being specific to Google Gtalk.

Many times we think that a person is online but it doesn’t show on gtalk , probably because people use the invisible feature of gmail. There is a very easy and efficient way of finding out invisible people or friends or coworkers if someone is really offline or is just pretending to be offline being invisible. Just follow these simple steps

1. Open the message window for the contact for which you want to find out whether he is online or not. From the side menu from the down arrow in the window, select Go off the record.

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2.Now send any message like say “hi”, dont worry if the person is really offline he wont get this message when he comes back online because you have set the chat off the record. The chat wont be saved in either of your gmail accounts.

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3. Now if the person is really offline you will get a red message saying “@gmail.com is offline and cant receive your messages right now”. If you dont get any message like this that means that the person is invisible and not offline.

31Give it a try and leave your feedback here. also tell me if it worked for you or not. If you know any other way of finding invisible people on  any other IM too please do talk about it in comments.