Best all in one chat softwares: MSN Yahoo Gtalk ICQ and others

There's nothing like the real ones

First of all you need to know that the best messengers and chat programs for you are the original ones, like Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Gtalk, and ICQ. Those will come with the latest features and will probably support your messaging protocol better.

If you only use one of those, you might consider using the original one.

This guide is targeted at people who use more than one messaging service and need a better solution then having several chat programs and messengers running simultaneously in your system.

The Solution

The solution for being able to use the messaging protocols that you're registered in (for instance, MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk and ICQ) is having a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client.

Those are popular (not as popular as the original messengers from Microsoft, yahoo, Google and ICQ) and you'll find a version for your operating system for sure. Let's talk about the most popular out there:

Pidgin

Pidgin (formerly Gaim) is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that supports AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, MySpaceIM, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo! and Zephyr.

Pidgin is free software. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2. This means you are free to use it and to modify it, but if you distribute your modifications you must distribute the modified source code as well.

Whatever your Operating System might be, I'm sure you'll find a version of Pidgin that you can use. Pidgin is available for Windows and UNIX platforms, meaning that you can compile Pidgin for your UNIX based system, for an example, your favourite Linux distribution. Pidgin comes automatically installed in Ubuntu, Foresight, and many other GNOME based Linux distributions.

If you thought that you were left out just because you use Mac, you are not. Pidgin also has it's version for Mac, but it has a different name: Adium.

If you have more questions about Pidgin, visit they're FAQ. It's very complete and helps in many ways.

Trillian

Trillian is another great multi-protocol Instant Messaging client.

It's only available for Windows, but the Mac and iPhone version are being tested and developed. It supports AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger and IRC. Be sure to check out Trillian Astra, the upcoming Trillian release.

Unlike Pidgin, Trillian is not open source software and there is no Linux version of Trillian.

Proteus

Proteus is a popular instant messaging client for Mac OS X that supports multiple protocols through the libpurple library. It is written using OS X's Cocoa API.

It supports OSCAR including AIM, ICQ and .Mac services, Jabber, .NET Messenger Service, commonly known as MSN, Yahoo, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu and Lotus Sametime.

Others

There are other like Kopete (which is just like Pidgin, except for KDE based UNIX systems) and Qnext (multi-protocol instant messaging with P2P support for sending and sharing files) that I will not cover but it's wise to check them.

You can get a good comparison table over here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instant_messaging_clients. Check the ones that are tagged as "Multi-protocol" in the "Type" column.

Have a great time chatting with your friends on Multi-Protocol instant messaging clients :)