Photo credit: Ryan Pike

1. Oyco: Instant messenger that allows you to communicate with MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, AIM and other IM clients at the same time
2. Dodgeball: Social mobile networking technology that enables you to create or join groups of people you want to keep in touch with
3. Mabber: Mobile application that lets you chat and send messages wherever you are
4. Kopete: Multi-protocol instant messaging client allows you to access all major IM clients

1. Oyco
   
   
   
   Oyco is an instant messenger that allows you to communicate with MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ, AIM and Oyco IM users all at the same time. Oyco Messenger includes your personalized Oyco VoIP Dialer with over 30 minutes of free calling to any phone in North America and other countries around the world free as a new trial user. Make calls from any computer to any phone in the world - for pennies. PC to PC calls are always free. You can buy Oyco for one month at $ 4.95 and for a year at $58.00. Check out Oyco Shop to buy credit for SMS and VoIP calls. Free 30-days trial.
   
   http://www.oyco.com/





2. Dodgeball
   
   Dodgeball is a social mobile networking technology (now part of Google) that enables you to create or join groups of people you want to keep in touch with. You can find venues locations and broadcast messages to your friends and also get notified when the people you like are within 10 blocks from where you are located. Once you register and you join a group you simply need to send an SMS to 36343 and the system will forward it to your friends. Dodgeball is currently available in 22 US cities. Free to use.
   http://www.dodgeball.com/





3. Mabber
   
   Mabber developed a mobile application that lets you chat and send messages wherever you are. Required is a recent mobile phone equipped with Java and some sort of data-plan. After login you can transfer the existing contacts from other instant messaging networks (AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger) to your account. You can use Mabber either on the web or download the mobile client for your Java-enabled phone. With Mabber you can send messages with low cost, as it is cheaper than using SMS text messaging (1 kb of data allows for about 7 messages). Free to use.
   http://mabber.com/





4. Kopete
   
   Kopete is a multi-protocol, free software instant messaging client supporting Jabber, Google Talk, ICQ, AIM, Gadu-Gadu, GroupWise, IRC, .NET Messenger Service, SMS, and Yahoo! Messenger. Although it can run in numerous environments, it was designed for and integrates with the KDE desktop environment. Free download.
   http://kopete.kde.org