Internet messenger or chat applications — desktop or web-based — are nowadays one of the most popular applications on the internet. You can chat, audio call, video call, share files/images with your friends on the other side of the world using an internet connection. There are lots of chat applications, starting from desktop-only to web-based, and some even support cross-service.
As you know, some of the big players for internet messengers are: Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, Skype, Google Talk, ICQ, AIM, and Facebook. They have lots of users — I think more than half of internet users around the world. Especially now that they work on mobile phones, users can chat anywhere with a mobile connection.
Beside fun chatting with your friends, internet messenger is now used for business: to provide online support, business chat with your business partner, sharing ideas with other collaborators in your company even when you are in the same office/building, and conference chat with your team which is far away in the real world.
So here are some basic points of view of internet messenger feature comparison:
(Source from softpedia.com)
So what is the best? I can’t say. I am using all of them. So whatever my team or client uses to contact me, I use that service. But most of the time I’m active in both Y!M and Google Talk. I don’t really need file or video sharing. And if I want to video call or conference, I open my Skype. So I don’t want to make it complicated with all the overwhelming features.