Since Google made their Google Talk servers able to talk with other Jabber servers, this finally opened some possibilities to make use of the service. Google Talk is a nice IM application, using a nice open standards protocol (Jabber), but without users, there is little point in using it... Making it possible to add Jabber users to your GTalk account was a big step forward.
The ideal situation would be that Google Talk could simply integrate with the already existing IM networks like MSN, AIM, etc. Too bad, this isn't possible yet, but there is a work-around! Many Jabber servers also provide an MSN transport, which makes it possible to add your existing MSN contacts to your Jabber account. For this to work, you have to register to the MSN transport with your MSN account, and it automatically will import your MSN buddies to your Jabber account.
Now, the nice thing is that this also works with GTalk. Although Google doesn't provide such an MSN (or replace with any other IM network) transport, you still can use 3rd party MSN transports with your GTalk account. It may not be that straight-forward to set up, but it works (I've been using it for several months now like this), and one of the other nice things is that all converstations are automatically logged in GMail (if you enabled this). Since your MSN transports are imported, they also start to appear in you GMail "Quick contacts" list with their MSN status (like they do in your GTalk application).
So how to set it up now? This has already been covered by other people, so I won't repeat and simple point to Jeff's post at BigBlueBall...
