I’m just getting into this Instant Messaging thing. It’s great for firing off quick messages to folks when you’re online, and it’s a lot aster than e-mail. I’ve always had my yahoo! account, and after asking around, I found that my friends not only have a Yahoo! IM account, but a MSN and a AIM accounts, as well. The reason that they have so many IM accounts is that all of the accounts are proprietary and cannot communicate with each other. If you have a friend on AIM, and one on AOL, you can’t talk to both of them without having two accounts.

So, what’s a person to do? You sign up for accounts will all three services without downloading their particular chat client, and you log into them all through Trillian. Trillian provides a single interface for all of your IM needs, it supports skinning, and it’s free. Now that’s neat.

Ok, now you’re setup to chat with all of your friends and coworkers, dodging the e-mail systems of the world. What if you’re not a great typist? Most of the messages are short, and a lot of common expressions have their own acronyms to keep the conversation flowing. As I’m currently 14+ years over the age of 16, I must admit that I’m not actually too familiar with the lingo myself, so I find this guide to common IM phrases very useful.

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