I personally can't live without Skype; use it all the time to keep in touch with pretty much everybody, including those from both online and real life. Many people seem to keep this kind of stuff separated by creating two different accounts (one for former and other for latter), but I'm not really like that; I only use one account, because to me, it's much, much more convenient. I personally wasn't into this IM system few years back, but had to switch to it once MSN was killed off, and haven't looked back ever since. I love its interface; it's very simplistic, if you ask me. Plus, it starts up pretty fast, too. :] Only thing I dislike is that it tends to freeze itself every once in a while, and sometimes, the program wouldn't get back to normal unless you force quite. I've searching for some workaround, but unfortunately, I couldn't find any. Oh well; for now, I suppose I'll have to live with it. Could be a little bothersome, but aside from that, it's not exactly a huge deal.