If you spend a lot of time online, chances are that you use or have used some form of instant messenger. There are so many instant messaging services out there, it is tough to even know about all of them! The most popular services are AIM/AOL, MSN, Yahoo, GoogleTalk, and ICQ. So what do you do if you mainly use AOL but some friends of yours only use MSN? What you need is a multi-platform instant messaging client!
There are many free multi-platform instant messaging clients out there, but the most popular ones are probably Trillian and GAIM. I have been a big fan of Trillian free version for many years, but it has not been updated in a long time and the MSN Messenger component has had problems for a while. Lately I can not even connect to MSN Messenger through my Trillian client. So what is the solution? GAIM!
I am currently running the GAIM Instant Messenger client connected to AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), MSN Instant Messenger, Yahoo Instant Messenger and Sametime (company IM).
You can find links to the newest GAIM beta version from here:
http://gaim.sourceforge.net
I would suggest grabbing the newest beta version (highest number). If you are running Windows, get the version that has a similar name to “gaim-2.0.0beta5.exe“. Enjoy!
On a related note, it appears that Cerulean Studios (the makers of Trillian) are working on cooking up a brand new cross platform Instant Messenger client named Trillian Astra. You can take a sneak peak of the application here. I do not yet know whether or not they will offer a free version of Trillian Astra.
Gaim has been superseded by the Pidgin IM client. You can download it here: http://pidgin.im