One of the very first things I ever wrote on this blog was a public appeal for a Gmail invite, which I subsequently got (thanks to one of my random Internet groupies). Ever since, my Gmail account has become my favorite and default webmail platform, and I love it.
Recently, I also began trying out Gchat (thanks to my good friend from GW — hi Jeff!), and can I just say — I. LOVE. IT!
Although I have been having intermittent trouble with Gchat dropping keystrokes (MOST frustrating), I am more than willing to forgive the inconvenience (and the completely uninspiring smileys) for one simple reason: Gmail archives my conversations as though they were e-mails. Since I border on the obsessive with saving/archiving every morsel of my writing, this is completely awesome. I hate that MSN and Yahoo, my other two chat platforms of choice, make chat archives so much more clunky to access. In Gmail, I can not only pull them up with a quick search, but I can very easily search *within* the chats, too. Awesomeness!
I prefer to think of myself as the slightly odd random Internet groupie, thank you very much.
Another alternative is to use Trillian for all of your chatting needs. Have it save all of your chats to disk.
Then you can use Google Desktop to search the chat files. It's been a while since I've done this so your mileage may vary.
This way when you search for anything you just use google.com, including your own chats. Also with Google Desktop you can have it search your Gmail as well.