Set my Chat Status to: Visible, Away, Invisible, or Custom

Your status controls your availability to chat with your friends. Here's what the different statuses mean:

• Green: Available. You are online and ready to chat.
• Yellow: Idle. Your status automatically changes to idle when you're away from your computer for 15 minutes. You can't manually select to appear idle
• Red: Busy. This lets your contacts know you're busy and don't want to be interrupted
• Grey: Signed out of chat, or Invisible. If you set your status to Invisible, you'll appear to be signed out of chat even when you're actually signed in. Learn more

If you also use the downloadable Google Talk client, your status will be shared by the applications, as long as you're signed in to all of them. Please note however, that if you've set your status to 'Invisible,' and sign in to the Google Talk client, you will not be kept 'Invisible,' as the Google Talk client doesn't currently have the 'Invisible' status feature. Keep in mind that you can sign out of chat in Gmail, and still be online through Google Talk and vice versa.

More information:

• Who can see when I'm online?
• Blocking someone