A good blog post covering the latest rumours about Google's foray into instant messaging. There's certainly been a lot of fuss made about it, most obviously because of the impact Google Mail has had on other free web based email services. But in this case, I'm really not sure what more Google can offer the IM world that hasn't been done before. It's certainly got the other major messaging services running scared, though.
I'm not a huge user of IMs, but when I feel the need, I fire up Gaim, a nifty open source multi-protocol chat client, so I can be connected to all the major services (MSN, Yahoo, ICQ/AOL, Jabber) without running multiple client programs, which obviously no one wants to do.
So for me, Google Talk will probably be just another addition to the multiple protocols I use now. In fact, Google themselves already have instructions on setting up Gaim to use their "talk" server, which is actually just a Jabber server anyway.
It'll be interesting to see what develops and what the masses decide to do, though.