It is about time. Almost all the chat messengers out there allow users to chat with their friends from inside the web page. Now it you can chat with your MSN friends too from inside Hotmail.

Once you are signed in to your Hotmail web account, you can send instant messages from any computer connected to the Internet without any requirement for Windows Live Messenger to be installed. You can also send IMs to your Messenger contacts from the People page (your contact list). To do this, just click the contact’s picture, and you’ll see Send an instant message on the dropdown menu.

As per Windows Live’s blog:

Yes, you’ve been asking us, and we promised you’d get it soon. Well, the moment you’ve been waiting for has finally arrived: instant messaging from the web is here! Now you can send instant messages from the Windows Live Hotmail and People pages! This means that, even if you’re on a public computer where Windows Live Messenger isn’t installed, you can still send IMs to your Messenger contacts! 

Customers in Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and USA will see this feature for the first time today (as usual, rollout to different individuals is gradual, so if you don’t see it yet, please be patient). This feature rolled out to users in France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the UK last month. Not in your area yet? We will be rolling out web-based Messenger to more locations in the coming months.

So there you go. Start chatting away from inside your Hotmail.