Niche Stars: Reviews of Six Free Multi-service IM Clients

Are you tired of all those ads on AIM? Want more services than Yahoo! alone can provide? The fact is, there are plenty of alternatives to the big three IM clients -- AOL's AIM, Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger.

All the programs we review here embed those three services (and typically many more, such as Jabber). Not all these applications have the feature set of mainstream IM tools -- video and voice chat functions need improvement -- but most will serve you well in keeping in touch with your friends.

Each has its own unique twist. Meetro mashes up location information with IM; meebo is a Web-based client -- make that "Web 2.0-based"; eBuddy comes in a mobile phone version; Adium is free for Mac users and offers high customisation and multi-service options. Here's our list of programs to review:

Adium, eBuddy, meebo, Meetro, Pidgin and Trillian.

The features we'll focus on include service support, tabbed message windows, grouping contact lists, message history, chat text formatting, group chat and interface customisation. Read on and consider whether one of these intriguing IM programs might be better for you than the bloated standard IM clients.