Instant messaging recommendations?

[MrWally]

I've used basically all of 'em that we've mentioned. AIM, Yahoo, MSN, gaim, Trillian, etc.

 

I guess it really matters what the people you are planning to stay in contact with use, my friends at school use aim, while my relatives use yahoo, and my friends from sweden use MSN, so consequently, I use all three. If you're in a situation similar to mine then you'll obviously have to make accounts for all three, and then I'd suggest downloading and installing either trillian or gaim (which don't need seperate accounts, of course). Then while using, for instance, gaim, you can set in the preferences for it to automatically log onto all three of the accounts you made for the different clients and talk to your friends from each. The only real problem is that sometimes (specifically with gaim, I find) you can send over files to those who use a client other than gaim, and trillian isn't much better (i've only tested this with aim file tranfers, however). I've never used Miranda however, but from what I've tried my favorite is probably trillian, because of the added features such as conversation logging and such.