Yahoo follows Google with chat in email

Yahoo and Google are bucking horns again for who's on top of the web based search / email / maps / chat / news / everything category. Google introduced their GTalk product about a year ago, and shortly after they integrated it very smoothly into their GMail web client. A few days ago they upgraded it so that if you send an instant message to a friend who is offline, instead of getting a "user not available" message it automatically emails them your chat.

Now Yahoo has followed suit with integrating their Yahoo chat into their email client. I haven't used it yet, but it doesn't look as simple and streamlined as the GTalk version. But according to Yahoo, they have a much larger customer base for their chat program, so this was a no-brainer for them. It's a shame not that many people have embraced Google's GTalk client...