You must be new here. But seriously this is a surprisingly fast phase out with no further announcement from the new owners Google. No publicly stated alternatives or transition plan.
Not sure what "transition plan" they could possibly offer. They only exist as a frontend to other IM services. It takes literally 5 minutes to duplicate 10 IM accounts on another identical service (IMO,ebuddy,trillian,implus).
The only thing they had of value were the logs, and they're giving those out to download.
