Well… I didn’t get the perfectly universal option I wanted, but I did find where Google hides their status information. Google uses the Google Talk Badge to convey status, and also provide a guest access to the system for chatting.

 

For anyone else doing this, if you are a Google normal user, you will visit the following for your badge:
http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/New

For users of Google Apps, your badge will be available at:
http://www.google.com/talk/service/a/yourdomain.com/badge/New

 

I can’t believe I didn’t run across this last night. I guess I wasn’t using the right terms in the Google search engine to make it spit out what I wanted.