GTalk is slowly inching towards becoming a popular IM client and is almost the preferred means of communicating for most of the bloggers. That said GTalk has a very annoying feature where any Instant Messages sent to you shows up as a notification and can be easily viewed by anyone who is near you computer or looking at your screen.

This can get pretty bad and allow anyone to view your personal or private chats. Other IM clients like Yahoo only show you the first message and the rest of it is suppressed to the IM window itself.

That said you can suppress the IM notifications in GTalk too and save yourself some privacy while chatting using GTalk.

To do that open the main GTalk window and click on the Settings link in the top right hand side. This will popup a new window from where you can access GTalk settings.

In the settings tab navigate to notifications and disable show notification under Incoming Chat options.

Once you do that click on the Ok button and all your IM notifications will be suppressed to the chat window just like Yahoo Messenger. This is a tiny tip that can help you save your privacy from others when you are surrounded by them near your PC.