In a perfect world, we'd all agree on one instant messenger service, and that would be the end of it. Unfortunately, you'll never convince your college buddy to drop AIM, your grandma is stuck on MSN, your kid sister only uses Facebook IM, and for some godawful reason, your boss insists everyone communicate through Yahoo Messenger.
The good news is that there are a couple of ways to deal with it. First you can get an IM aggregator-- a program that can handle multiple messaging protocols. My favorite is Pidgin. Pidgin (formerly known as Gaim) has an easy to setup and use interface, is extremely customizable, is free, runs on Windows and Linux, and is compatible with tons of protocols. MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Facebook, and tons of others. For Mac users, there's a similar program called Adium that works great as well. This way, you don't have four or five programs sucking up screen space, system resources, and bandwidth.
If Pidgin isn't your thing, you don't message much, or for whatever reason, you can't load Pidgin on your machine, check out Meebo. Meebo is a free web service that provides similar functionality, but in a web browser. Just sign up for an account, and you can be chatting away in an instant.
And, if you're rocking a mobile device, check out Fring. Fring does all of the above on select mobile phones, and has Skype support. Nifty.
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