How do I start a group chat in Google's gchat?

You heard correctly, though this is a brand new feature as of just a few days ago as I write this. It's not hard to set up a group chat, but unlike Yahoo, you need to get the chat going with one person, then invite the others to join the two of you. I can show you, step by step, by creating a group Google gchat (gtalk? I'm not clear what the official name for this tool is, actually) chat with two of my friends, Tris Hussey and Rick Bruner.

To start, I'll get the chat going with Tris by finding him in my "Chat" area:

Notice here that the cursor is conveniently already over "chat". I click it, and not a second or two later, on the lower right corner of the screen, I see:

Tris and I are ready to chat, but now it's time to add Rick. I do that by clicking on "Options" in the lower left corner, which pops up a small menu of options:

I choose "Group chat" and then a small panel opens above the current chat window, letting me enter the third party:

Here I have to type in the first few letters of the person's name or email address. "rick b" is enough that it matches Rick and his email address. Once that match is established, a new set of options appears, including the most important, "Invite". Click on that and you have a new group chat going.

Normally, that's all you need to do, but sometimes the original person you're chatting with seems to get lost in the shuffle, as happened with this example. At this point I was connected with Rick, but Tris had gotten lost in the shuffle:

Using the same Options --> Group Chat followed by typing in the first few letters of Tris' name got me a match again, I invited Tris back, and just a few seconds later, success:

The three of us then happily chatted along, with Google dutifully recording our discussion in our archives for future reference.

You can add additional people on a chat using the same mechanism, though I am not sure of the maximum number of people allowed in a single chat. The only thing left on their to-do list? Give different people different color type in the chat window, so you can quickly differentiate who is saying what. But that's easy compared to getting a group to collectively chat simultaneously.

Anyway, that'll get you going, I'm sure!