On April 8, Microsoft will discontinue its Windows Messenger service. All current users will be switched to Skype. The Free Software Foundation Europe advises former users of Windows Messenger to take this as an opportunity to embrace Open Standards such as Jabber (XMPP) instead of switching to Skype.

Matija Šukle writes: "Exactly three months ago I wrote that I'm migrating to XMPP/Jabber and slowly leaving all proprietary IM protocols. In that blog post is also an example message I'm leaving my contacts why I'm doing it."

Pidgin is a chat program which lets you log in to accounts on multiple chat networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on MSN, talking to a friend on Google Talk, and sitting in a Yahoo chat room all at the same time. New release includes a ton of bug fixes, some new features, and a fix for a security issue.

Finch is a powerful text user interface instant messaging client based on libpurple, and it comes included in the Pidgin source, the popular GNOME IM client. Finch supports various protocols, including AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and IRC.

Mozilla Labs developers have revealed project Raindrop, an approach to handling a large number of messages from email and RSS to YouTube and Twitter.

Instant Messanging (IM) clients are not a very popular topic in the FOSS and Linux community, most talk about browsers, music applications and just plain distros. Many may think there are only three to five instant messaging applications for Linux, but the open-source community offers much more than just a few. Here's a list.

This article is an overview of 4 most popular IM clients available on Linux, and particularly in the upcoming release of Ubuntu, Jaunty Jackalope.

GNU/Linux users mostly unable to access Microsoft's IM protocols