I have tested today the GTalk/Twitter integration. By sending an instant message to Twitter you can twitt and receive your friends twitts. It's really great : Twitter becomes a kind of broadcasting chat engine.

It's a common trend that I have seen at IBM also. You can add a service - called a Bot- as one of your buddiesand ask him questions. It's the computer on the other side who talks to you.

For example, at IBM we have a number of Instant Messaging bots available on Sametime to employees, including:

• Calendar, which searches the calendars of specified people to find a mutually available meeting time
• Dictionary, which looks up requested words in an online dictionary
• Help, which allows users to search across multiple online help systems
• RemindMe, which notifies users when a time/calendar event occurs (for example an upcoming meeting or vacation)
• SkillTap, which finds and connects users with others possessing one or more requested skills
• Stockquote, which retrieves price data from any online stock market ticker (not that we spend a lot of time doing this during work hours, of course!)
• WhatIs, which defines IBM acronyms (and is therefore very popular)

There is a technical article over here : Building your own Sametime bots. If you know some good bots for GTalk, MSN or Yahoo, please let me know.