As I mentioned earlier, you can connect to Google’s IM service, Google Talk, via 3rd party applications such as Trillian (as described here).

Anyway, Trillian has been having issues though with it, always spitting out errors like “Connection lost to server” and such. However, one of the Trillian developers has released a beta of new version of the Jabber plugin. It fixes all issues related to Google Talk, or at least it did for me. If you’re using Trillian Pro and want to connect to the Google Talk service, download this ZIP file and extract it to your Trillian directory. It should hopefully fix any issues you’re having. :D