There’s a lot of IM (instant message) clients out there that will bring you in contact with friends, family and co-workers in real time. They allow file transfers, image transfers, ongoing conversations and loads of other interesting things that we learn to depend on over time.

Well, what to do when you have contacts spread out over several IM clients like Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, Google Talk, etc.? There are many including Jabber and to have all of them open on your desktop at once is well, a bit distracting at best. Not to mention hard to keep up with.

Enter Pidgin. Pidgin is a graphical modular messaging client which is capable of connecting to AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, XMPP, ICQ, IRC, SILC, SIP/SIMPLE, Novell GroupWise, Lotus Sametime, Bonjour, Zephyr, MySpaceIM, Gadu-Gadu, and QQ all at once.

Pidgin used to be called GAIM up until it was updated recently which was a popular IM client in it’s own right.

All one has to do is to download and install Pidgin then, enter your contacts in the appropriate fields such as ICQ, MSN, Yahoo or any of the others mentioned above. Enter your preferences and you’re set to go.

Two of the nice features about Pidgin that are especially useful to me is that if I receive an email from someone in either of the email clients that I use such as Gmail for example, it’s immediately displayed at the top of the Pidgin window as a notice so I can check it out.

The other thing I like is that it’s available for both Windows and Linux so if I should need to boot into my Windows OS (operating system) for anything, all I need to do is to boot up Pidgin too and I’m back in contact with everyone once again.

For a free IM client that works in both OS environments plus gives you notice of email waiting in your inbox, Pidgin is a great multi-purpose tool for the desktop.