As some may have already noticed, the "chat" option on the left hand menu appeared this morning.
It seems that within a week or so, we will have the ability to send instant messages directly from the GMail screen.
I am a fan of browser based chat, mainly because it's easier to get past a restrictive firewall
I've used the
MSN browser based chat for a while, but found the interface tedious and slow.
It will be interesting to see what Google produce in the next couple of weeks.
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/chat.html
It certainly looks like it could be a winner, next job is to move all our backward MSN only contacts onto GMail