ronin - 9:38 pm on Feb 26, 2008 (gmt 0)

Oh yea, it'll hurt "live support" vendors for SURE...will make them bring prices down at the very least.

Maybe, though Meebo (no affiliation) have had something like this out for quite a while now. I tried out Meebo's widget about halfway through last year and then put it on the shelf, meaning to get back to testing it properly at some point.

Admittedly, Meebo doesn't have quite the marketing engine behind it that Google does.