I'm going to take a little time to talk about my all-time favorite IM client, Digsby. Like many, I have a few different internet communication services going- a Gtalk/Gmail account, AIM, Facebook, a Jabber service at my work, and twitter.
I've tried serving them all out of one program with limited success- Trillian did most things pretty well, Gtalk did Gmail and AIM great (as did chatting straight out of the gmail web client), but left out any other functionality.
However, I just discovered Digsby, an amazing cross-platform client that serves up about any account you can think of. Not only does it let you chat across services, but it shows you facebook updates in a way that makes sense, and lets you interact with Gmail messages without opening up a browser (not even Google's own IM client does that!).
Here's Digsby on AIM (SMS and file transfer work fine):
And here it is doing twitter:
You can see exactly what sort of facebook updates are waiting for you:
And my favorite, gmail. Actually, any of the clients can be displayed as tiny icons in the taskbar as well as from the sidebar, but gmail is my favorite, because I can see a snippet of the message, and instantly archive it (I've been working on the theory of Inbox Zero lately) if it's something I don't need to deal with.
All in all, a sweet client, and the best part is that your preferences and accounts sync across computers! Digsby runs a free server that stores user settings, so when I get home from work and boot up, my digsby client behaves exactly the same as the one on my work laptop. Genius!
