Sending someone a picture or document while chatting online can seem like the most natural thing in the world; it's common enough for topics like children or school papers to be discussed.  So Google's upgraded one of its offerings by making it easier for people to trade files.

A post on the Google Talkabout Blog announced this afternoon, "Starting today, you can share photos, documents, and other files while chatting in iGoogle and orkut.  To give it a try, just click Send a file... in the Actions menu while chatting with a friend (no download required):"

That should come in handy for a few folks.  What's more interesting, though, is that Lizhen Wang, a software engineer at Google, also stated, "We're working on bringing it to Gmail as well, and we'll keep you posted when that happens!"

That may happen soon, too.  Gmail has millions and millions of users who depend on every component to work reliably, of course, but Orkut has millions and millions of users worldwide (it's extremely popular in India and Brazil), meaning Wang and the other engineers Google's assigned to this job have already scaled up the feature quite a lot.

We'll be sure to report back when the implementation takes place.