More cool features from google chat: you now can log into AIM and chat with your AIM contacts from google chat. You still need to have an AIM account, but you no longer need to use the AIM client to talk to your contacts on that service.
It's about time, too. Google chat is a Jabber client, and there are transports out there that bridge between Jabber and other chat protocols, but for some reason google does not have servers running those transports. Even though you can do it using other servers they are a pain to configure (you can't do it through any google client or settings page, you have to download another client (like Psi), find your way to a server of questionable security and availability, and perform some voodoo to get everything working right) and even then it is iffy.
I have long wondered why google has not set up transports and whether they someday will, and it looks like this may be a step in that direction. I don't yet know whether they are using the XMPP transports or some other method to do the bridging, but whatever they are doing I hope they extend it to ICQ (really an AOL property), MSN, and Yahoo! so I can ditch my desktop chat clients entirely.
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