Bold and Italics in Google Chat

I just learned something really cool about Google Chat: you can make things bold or italic. I've wanted to do that so many times:

This text is *bold* => This text is bold
This text is _in italics_ => This text is in italics
This text is -struck out-. => This text is struck out.
This is _italicized *and_ bold* => This is italicized and bold

This is seriously one of the coolest things I've learned all week.

Update: Apparently this same thing works in Facebook, too.