Google IM?

"Google's plans for April Fool's day"

"Last year, Google Inc. (GOOG: news, chart, profile) introduced its free e-mail service, Gmail, on April 1. Some of the initial reaction was skeptical. A gigabyte of storage? Free? No way! But it turned out to be true. Now there is some speculation about what the king of search may have up its servers this year.

Philipp Lenssen, who writes Google Blogoscoped, is among those who say the suspense is building. One of his readers suggests there are two possibilities: Gmail (finally) comes out of beta test, and Google introduces its own instant messenger service.
'If GIM (Google IM) goes live,' Lenssen responded, 'there will likely be a new round of privacy discussions. After all, Google would display its context ads based on what you chat about."

Google's Hello already has a chat feature. What ever happened to Orkut btw (the site is horrendously slow...)?
[CBS Marketplace / Barnarko]