Consolidate Your IM Accounts With Pidgin

If you're like everyone else, you've probably got more than one instant messaging account on more than one protocol. There are a few decent clients on Windows that can consolidate your Google Talk, MSN and Yahoo accounts (among others).

Pidgin is a free, open-source application that lets you do that. It has a nice interface, and works quite nicely.



I tried a few different clients on Windows, and Pidgin and Digsby were the nicest. Digsby is in a semi-closed beta right now, and requires an invite code. Lifehacker and Ars had some invite codes, but may have ran out by now. Miranda, while skinnable, has a Windows 95, ICQish GUI out of the box, which was a bit of a turn-off.

Pidgin supports tabbed browsing, a pile of protocols and has a nice, simple GUI.

Digsby is worth watching out for, however, as it adds social networking (i.e., Facebook and MySpace) as well as e-mail integration. It could just become your one-stop shop for personal communications. But, today, I tend to think that Pidgin is your best instant messaging aggregator.

Tags: freeware, instant messaging, im, msn, googletalk, windows, digsby, miranda, facebook, myspace