How to Use One IM Program for All of Your Friends

Do you enjoy IM, but your buddies all use different Instant Messengers? If you need to have AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, and ICQ all open on your desktop at the same time just to "chat" with all of your friends, here's a solution.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Time to decide which one you want to use.
• Time to download and test.

1. IM Status Symbol There are a few Instant Messenger (IM) applications that will help to simplify chatting with friends while uncluttering your desktop at the same time. First you will just need the time to go to the website of each one to check them out and decide which features you prefer, or you can go to a download site that may feature them all and do a comparison.
2. IM Emoticon Go to ceruleanstudios.com and check out a great multi-client chat app called Trillian. Trillian allows you to chat with your friends that use AIM,Yahoo Messenger,MSN(Live)messenger, ICQ, and IRC, all at once, with the same login information that you already use for different the different messengers, with great features like emoticons, file transfer and more. Once you get it set up, one universal log in for Trillian, will log you into all of your contacts at once!
3. Next, head on over to meebo.com, and you'll find an excellent web-based instant messaging program that allows you to IM or chat with all of your friends on AIM,Yahoo,Google Talk,and MSN. ICQ and Jabber are also available networks. Because Meebo is web-based, there's no download at all, and it serves as a useful resource when you're traveling without your pc or using someone else's pc and need to send some messages or have quick chats, and don't want to or can't download instant messengers!

Tips & Warnings

• It may be helpful to make a little comparison chart of the features for each messenger, to decide which you want to use if you just want to choose one.
• While the free version of Trillian has many wonderful features, Trillian Pro adds more features such as recording video conversations for a price.
• If you decide to use Trillian, it's better to uninstall the old IM applications, though not necessary.