Imagine this scenario, you have tonnes of friends who are happily chating away in Yahoo! Messenger. But you are using MSN Messenger, how can you chat with them? Of course you could always download Yahoo! Messenger and install it… it’s free anyway. But, you don’t fancy installing another software on your already crawling computer…

There’s a solution, look for Pidgin, which is an multi-platform instant messaging program for Windows, Linux, BSD, and many other Unix variants. Pidgin was renamed from GAIM. The name change is the result of a painfully-achieved settlement with AOL which should also unblock the delayed 2.0 release of the software.

Anil Dash says Pidgin rocks, and is following the trajectory taken by Firefox, currently the most popular open source browser.

Pidgin, formerly GAIM, is the best instant messaging client available; It works with all common IM networks, supports extensions and customizations through plugins, has smart and simple default settings, runs on all common desktop platforms, and is a free open source application. Being so similar to Firefox in so many ways, this leaves the application poised to become the “Firefox of IM”.

With Pidgin, you can chat to your friends in AIM, ICQ, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, and Zephyr…. the list is so long…. With this feature, you can chat with many girlfriends in many platforms all at the same time? You say cool and sexciting or not?