AIM? ICQ? MSN? Yahoo?

[kiania]

I use trillian for AIM and Yahoo, but I think I only have 5 or 6 people on my AIM list (1 on Yahoo), of which I speak to 2 people regularly, the rest I just use it as a backup for MSN. Do like the fact that you can set away messages using Trillian!

MSN I use with their own client (instead of putting it through trillian), simply because it means I can use my webcam, personalised emotes, and all the other funky features.

Skype is always the best for microphone using though!

[Jidoe]

Seeing the people who invented ICQ are local, I used that program when there was nothing ever similar to that and pretty much liked the fact that it records history) but since noone I know uses it anymore, I don't use it.

Now I only use AIM (mostly it's pretty stable. the only shame is that there are no foreign fonts).

[Bael]

ICQ - The first instant messenger I used to talk to a very specific Thresher some almost eight years ago now. Don't talk to very many people on it any more, but still use it.

Aim - by far the most popular, and really simple of them, being something of a fan of minimalism from time to time, makes sense. Pretty straight forward without all the bells and whistles that bog the others down

MSN - Don't use it much, there's really only one person I talk to there who's not associated with the game.

Yahoo - again, about three people I really talk to much on here, but they don't really use the other messengers

Trillian - I've never been terribly impressed with Trillian, I have a friend who swares by it, but he's the uber-paranoid anti-adware type. So he's all against ICQ/AIM's advertising and whatnot. But I've seen much better put together programs

Adium X - I've been using this more and more as of late. It's a messenger client for OSX (so I use it on my powerbook), and it uses GAIM's communication guts (yay open source), but has a much, much nicer front end than Trillian. It's still got issues with file transfers and the like, and some with direct connections with AIM, but saying that it's still only version 0.84, it's rather nice. Compatable with so much crap it's not even funny, though I use it for ICQ/AIM/MSN.

[Talsek]

I use a console-based (no GUI) client for Linux called Pork to connect to AIM and very occasionally ICQ. It used to frustrate me that I could never get anyone but my geek friends to use ICQ. I guess at the time the whole thing seemed flashy and sexier than AIM, but eventually the client seemed bloated and unnecessarily complicated. Pork represents the opposite end of the spectrum :P.

I love Pork because of how bare-bones it is. No buddy icons, no crazy fonts, just text. And of course the best part is that since it's all console-based, it runs in the background on my home machine all the time. I can connect to it from anywhere as long as I have PuTTY (another hug-worthy program). That avoids the annoyance of missing messages because you're at the wrong location, or getting those ugly 'You're logged in at more than one location' errors. Ah, sweet convenience.

[Belaraiya]

I stil swear by Trillian, because using MSN as a stand alone program used to crash my computer, and take yahoo down with it.

That, and I'm too lazy to load up and sign into multiple programs when I can just hit a button and sign into them all at once. I don't use ICQ anymore because I don't know anyone who really uses it anymore, ditto MSN. I log in, but theres usually no one on (or no one I want to talk to), so I sit on AIM and yahoo