That's good for those who run different OSes or who don't want to be committed to installing software locally. And there's a web version of gtalk which beats the PANTs off of the aol crapfest they've called aim express. Easy enough for my parents to use, no ads.less spyware concern because google doesn't have an evil time warner overlord. Then google finally put out google talk, a great implementation. As far as I got was logging into multiple networks in gaim-which is NOT what I was hoping for. Over the past seemingly decade, there was talk of cross-network integration.a la msn meets aim, etc. The only thing AOL really seemed to be working on was adding loud video ads and fighting against the people who tried to make their crap usable - like deadaim and it's ilk, gaim, etc. Then everything seemed to stay the same for liek 5 years. I remember Aim being ok, but ICQ was much better.well naturally AOL bought mirabilis for 300M-odd dollars way back when and then did the 'standard operating procedure' (see the story of Netscape, Nullsoft, et al) of just letting it fester without updates while they pushed their product.ĪIM was pretty much the only game in town after that for me.I had my people on AIM, and didn't see any reason to move to yahoo, let alone Msn. I was introduced to IM through ICQ back before AIM existed.

Jabber and icq for sell