Google swallows IM, no injuries reported - yet

I saw the story on Slashdot last night, but a Platinum Circle mega-value reader alerts me to Sean Egan's blog inside the Gaim site. Notable quote:

"...I've been working to offer all of Google Talk's features into other
clients. Currently, I'm working on making it as easy as possible for other
clients to use Google Talk's voice features. You can expect Gaim and other
clients to be interoperable with Google Talk's voice features in the near
future."

At only around 9.3m downloads to date, Gaim can hardly claim global dominance in the face of MSN/Yahoo!'s community of 275m, but that's hardly the point. Gaim is the glue which is capable of binding all these disparate communities together (with the notable exception of Skype) without the need for press releases and public shows of mutual respect.