Pidgin v Trillian, two multi-IM clients

Using the telephone is easy, as it's based around and agreed standard. Pick up the phone, call someone down the road or in South America. Either way, as long as they have a phone, you'll be able to chat with them. Chatting across the Internet should be just as easy, but it isn't. Why not? As Microsoft, AOL, Skype, Yahoo and others have developed their own standards which are not always compatible with other IM clients. If you use MSN Messenger, you can't chat with a Skype user, for example.

Trillian 3.1.5.1 and Pidgin 2 beta 7 are two multi-platform instant messaging clients that support a number of different IM standards. This means that whether a friend is using MSN Messenger or AIM, you should be able to chat directly with these users, swap files and more. In fact, they won't even know what you're using to chat to them - they might think you're using the same chat client as them.