How many IM clients does one guy need on his laptop? Let’s get this straight, I can only chat to so many people at once, now why can’t they all use the same client?

I have MSN, it’s kind of the de facto standard that most people seem to have these days (probably because it comes bundled with Windows?), I’ve also got Yahoo installed (for the Anti-Microsoft brigade).

What about the rest?

• I tried MySpaceIM (the people I actually want to chat to are mostly on MSN anyway so I never login).
• Skype, Yep I’ve got that installed too – but more for SkypeIn number being tied to the business, so that has to be on my machine.
• ICQ, I binned years ago – although I suspect it’s still running in one form or another!?
• AIM, I did have installed up until I changed laptop’s – never reinstalled it.

See, all of the above and still people text and email me!

So on Matt’s suggestion this morning I went digging for info on Pidgin (formerly GAIM), it certainly sounds like it should do the job so I’ve downloaded it (whilst chatting to Matt on his version of it!).

It’s not light at 10.9MB (28.1MB standard install) but I guess it may take some of the other stuff off my machine, I doubt it supports video for MSN, but we’ll see!

Installation Update: It’s uninstalled my GTK+ 2 runtime library, which I’m a “little” concerned about.

Running Update: It won’t connect to Google Talk and I’m not letting it try to connect to MSN whilst I’m chatting to people – so I’ll keep you posted on progress in the coming days.