[Air-l] Available Chat/IM Tools?

[elijah wright]

> I use Trillion, which allows IM/chatting to all four of the main
> clients: MSN Messenger, ICQ, Yahoo and AOL.

unfortunately, trillian is intended for end-users, not site owners wishing
to provide a workable chat service to visitors.  the jabber suite of
protocols is open-source and the server stuff is free - keeping site
administrators from becoming beholden to any one of the commercial IM
providers.  [having a site that demands you install yahoo chat or AIM or
MSN looks, in short, 'cheap' (in the sense of poorly operated, chintzy,
clicheed, etc).]

digging around on the jabber site a bit should turn up some PHP and other
web-friendly clients that you should be able to drop into your CMS or
other site software without a tremendous amount of trouble.

elijah