Thinking about switching from MSN mail to Gmail; Messnger program query
 

Currently, I have MSN which I pay about $9.95 a month and I am considering to switch to Gmail. My question is does Gmail have a chat program that I can use to chat with other messenger programs such as Yahoo Messenger. I am currently using Windows Messenger and wanted to know if Google offers the same thing or similar.

Google themselves don't, but you can install a third party chat client like Trillian, pidgin or one of many others that supports cross-platform chatting.

What would be a higly recommend program to use?

So that means I can use a Gmail account and say chat with someone who is using Yahoo Messenger and such?

Google has a chat built in to its mail.google.com page; you can see if your gmail contacts are online and chat with them in a box, transfer documents, etc.

The in-page chat also works with AIM users.

You can look into pidgin for a third party chat client that does jabber (google talk protocol), yahoo, msn, AIM, etc. It's a great client but as with most of these 3rd party chat clients, most of them do not do video. You end up needing to use the native clients to do video chat in general. (I'm sure some do some of the video protocols, but I've never found one that did them all.)

on the mac, I use adium.

-David