Adium: Tom’s Budget Software Pick

Adium is a messaging client for the Mac that works with many popular IM services. Most avid users of messaging systems have friends and colleagues scattered across multiple messaging systems. You may have your home network with all of your family using iChat, and have friends on the Internet who use Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, or AIM.

Adium

In order to keep connected with everyone and the various services they use, you would usually need to have each specific client open on your Mac, taking up desktop space, and distracting you from other tasks. Adium lets you use a single messaging client to interface with all of the popular messaging systems. One client to rule, er, work with them all!

Adium supports AIM, ICQ, MobileMe, MSN Messenger, Jabber, Google Talk, Live Journal, Yahoo! Messenger, iChat, Bonjour, MySpace, Facebook, Lotus, Novel, QQ, and Gadu-Gadu. And Adium has a plug-in architecture that makes it easy to add new services. Plug-ins are available for Skype, Twitter, YouTube, and others.

Adium is free. You can download it from the Adium web site.

See other software choices from Tom’s Budget Software Picks.