Things have been changing rapidly since this article was written, as nearly everything does in cyber-space. There are many more providers and clients, and more companies are integrating IM into their other offerings (i.e, Skype), making things even more complex. And, there are even tools such as Twitter that are a kind of one to many IM. It will be interesting to see in a few years if things consolidate to a few major players or not and what new IM-ish technologies emerge.

Basically a quick way to answer an a/b question from a diverse demographic. The comments are particularly fun to read. It’s settled a number of disagreements within our team meetings and saves us the time of hypothesizing.

On the mac, there’s some nice seamless integration so you can just drag files to a local folder and have it replicated to folders shared with your teammates. I think the first few gigs are free.