This morning Google announced its new video chat capability with an eye-catching link at the top of the Gmail window.  Clicking the link takes you to this page, where you can see a nifty video that makes video chat look pretty cool.  But the link to “Get Started” takes you to a dead page (http://mail.google.com/videochat).

The interesting thing isn’t that the service coughed up blood on its first day out.  The interesting thing is that, ten hours later, http://mail.google.com/videochat is still 404.

It can be hard to revive an overwhelmed application, but it’s really, really easy to put up a page to let users know what’s going on.

I wonder why Google is leaving this page 404?  It doesn’t inspire confidence.