[claudius]

A good starting point for that would be to allow invites from people you have already added to your contact list, i.e. [e-mail] authorised [e-mail] to get status updates and Y added them to their contact list, but authorisation requests from X to Y still appear to be dropped.

[naiquevin]

This makes perfect sense to me. Chat is an important part of a service that my company provides to our users. We received great response after launching "gtalk integration" for chat until some new users started reporting problems due to this issue. We tried the other way around ie. having them send an invite to us but sadly that doesn't work as well. Hope google comes up with a better solution soon.