Google is launching inline chatting for Gmail in the near future. There is already an option in your Gmail settings (or at least in mine, it seems to be coming online account-by-account) to save all your Google Talk chat logs into a section of your Gmail account called ‘chats’, to be searchable just like your email. There is also an information page stating that they plan to include the ability to chat directly from your Gmail screen (a la Meebo and others). This should prove interesting.

Google Talk has been opened to communicate with other XMPP IM services! One of the complaints against it when it first launched was that it used the open XMPP protocol, but was a closed system. No longer. This is a smart, and a useful, move for them. Hopefully they’ll add MSN/AIM/ICQ integration eventaully as well…