They are supposed to save you the hassle of having many chat programs, so you can have all your chat clients in one little program. Is it just me? or do you all think that this is BS? I mean they look horrible, the interface is horrible, and everything is just so difficult to get used to..... Not to mention that they are not fully compatible with all the features like custom emoticons, etc.... Your views? And if you do think that I am wrong, what program do you recommend me using? At the moment I just use Windows Live Messenger 2009 with the A-Patch to remove all the advertisements and to enable me to nudge people as much as I want with no limitation of time
I use trillian 3.1 pro does the job , i don't need it to look pretty but you can get addons and other skins if required. Also you just enable the ones you want to use i only actually use the MSN one and the main reason I do prefer trillian is because of the chat history and for unattended installs you just need to copy over the folder.
I use Digsby: it's fully customizeable. Interface, emoticons, sounds, you can change anything you want. It supports all kinds of protocols including MSN, ICQ, AOL, Twitter, Facebook and it checks your mail ^^. atm I use it with 2 msn accounts, google talk, twitter, facebook and it checks email for two hotmail accounts.
I totally agree with Matrix Leader, IMHO Multi IM Programs suck. I preffer to use the official programs, because they have all the features (that's obvious but it's the main reason ) I use Windows Live Messenger, Skype and the Gmail chat. It's just a matter of prefferences, just like I preffer Google Chrome over any other browser.