Google will seemingly not let up its torrid pace of updates. Today, once again, we have another update to Gmail - the ability to connect to AOL's AIM network. Finally. This is huge news for anyone (such as myself) who uses AIM from time to time because it means you can now easily talk to your AIM contacts right from within Gmail.

It also means that AIMs millions of users might finally start waking up to what a crappy client AIM itself is - yes I know there are a ton of other options to use to connect to the service, but many people don't realize it/don't care enough to switch - however if they are also using Gmail and see they can simply login within there, perhaps they'll wake up.

While you do have to have an AIM account that you can log into to make this work, the end result is very seamless - one list of buddies, Gmail handles who you can message with what name. It is a bit annoying to have to scroll through all your buddies if you have a lot imported from AIM - Gmail should let you manually reorder this list, or better yet, group them - but the option to show only the most popular seems to work very well.

Also great is that any chat you now have over the AIM network in Gmail is saved in your 'Chats' area just like a Google Talk chat would be. I can't tell you how often I search through these old conversations for tidbits of information said in conversations.

In their posting, the Gmail team appears to be very open to allowing Google Talk to connect to any of the other IM networks willing to participate as well.

I also very much enjoyed their throwback to a post from almost 2 years ago with their title "Gmail + chat + AIM = crazy delicious" (which of course is in reference to "Lazy Sunday" - which I would link to except NBC in all their greedy wisdom keeps pulling it off YouTube) - somehow I remembered that.