While I'm on the subject of chat, I figured I could talk about Pidgin. Pidgin is a multiprotocol IM (Instant Messenger) client. It can handle quite the long list of chat protocols: AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, MySpaceIM, QQ, SILC , SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo!, Zephyr. A number of these I've never heard of. I don't use it for IRC (see last post,) but I do use it for AIM, GTalk, MSN, ICQ and Yahoo messenger (yes, I have accounts using all of those protocols. Should I hunt up Zephyr?) Pidgin is available for Windows or Linux. It used to be called GAIM. The engine underneath Pidgin is called libpurple - which is also underneath the FOSS IRC Client Adium, for Mac OS X.  (Adium is what I used when I was on a Mac desktop.) Pidgin is great software. It's the best FOSS IM client I've used so far (and I've used quite a few.)  It's got great plug-ins, too.