Jabber
Okay, I know what you’re thinking: this is where Bill admits that he talks too much.
Nope, that’s not it.
Jabber is the name of an Instant Messaging environment. It used to be the name of the underlying protocol, but they call that XMPP now. But don’t worry about that.
If you are an ICQ, AIM or MSN user, you should switch. All three of those networks try to lock you in. Imagine what email would be like if your AOL email address only worked to reach other AOL users. (It used to be that way, once, for AOL users. It was unpleasant!)
There are a bunch of Jabber clients for whatever computing platform you use, and there’s lots of servers available. If you like, you can use the server that I’m hosting: rebma.pro-ns.net. It’s set to allow signups from everyone.
If you do switch to Jabber, give me a shout. My JID (Jabber ID) is wmo@rebma.pro-ns.net