Of course, the other option would be to set up your own local jabber server with gateways. I did this while here at Children's, for something interesting to do, and by gosh if it doesn't work like a champ. The chats read perfectly fine in iChat! Here's the article I used, and pretty much by the numbers:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071030041941679
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