under instant messaging dude, trillian is quite a program these days. i used it years ago and it was buggy so i gave it up to just use msn and icq, but i recently installed trillian and it's amazingly stable and better laid out. for anyone that's never heard of trillian, it allows you to access msn, icq, yahoo and aol's instant messaging facilities with one convenient program, it also has irc in it and looks quite sexeh.
really useful for the people with 2 or 3 messengers installed.
here's the addy
rob
ps. i just actually checked the site and it's looking cooler than ever