Being the only real mac user in my group of friends. Sometimes I feel as though I'm missing out on part of the mac experience.

I have an AIM account setup for iChat with.....2 people on my list, both of which are never even online most of the time. All my friends are on MSN. So I basically never get to use iChat. This kinda sucks, because I feel like I'm missing out on using a completely awesome chat app, and instead forced to download Microshit to converse with friends.

So this is probably a bizarre question, but I thought it'd be an interesting topic. Has anyone successfully converted your Windows MSN users over to AIM, just so you can chat with them in the prettier iChat? Haha.

Nope...I failed at that...they are all very ignorant Windows users who Love MSN coz they dont know any better.... and even if they do, everyone else still uses MSN so they dont bother...its a chicken and egg kinda thing...

This may help you though

How to: MSN through iChat!

Enjoy!

Not always true .. many MSN users are Mac users who have Mac using contacts who are important to them but are restricted to MSN for various reasons.

Many of my Mac using friends often only appear on their MSN contact // on my list.

My son who travels a lot O/S and is currently in a job where he can only communicate via a PC. Often he could only communicate from an internet café.

All of which mean I am glad he kept his MSN contact up.

Check out this hint it sets up a local server and transports for most IMs

how the hell this country swapped from ICQ to MSN in a little under 6 months back in 2000 ill never know

I hate the idea of using a public Jabber transport for MSN - but a local transport would suit me just fine! Looks like I'll have a chance to put the new iChat through it's paces when I get Leopard after all.

It was the spambots - do you remember getting random messages every 5-10 minutes from porn-spam-bots?

No one in their right mind could tolerate that for long....

I still find ICQ the most reliable secure contact with my son. Though he and I use all of the client accounts..available.

My ICQ number isn't #1 but it isn't a 9 digit signature by a long shot.

think maybe it had a lot to do with OS X

None. I flicked over to Adium just so I could still contact friends of mine, most of which are just pals and what not from school, they don't care about the protocol, just as long as it sends and receives the text.

That said I think they've converted me. I haven't fired up iChat in about 3 months mostly using Adium, and even then I only use the AIM accounts to speak to one person.

Adium for me too .. iChat is a pain in the rear.

But then .. so too is AIM client.

From the advent of Proteus I moved away from the various client apps the accounts required.
Adium cured me of Proteus.

Well... out of the 40 contacts that I had, 35 of them moved to googletalk and/or skype. most were sick of msn, and how unreliable it was for them as well. I know it's not directly in-topic to AIM.. but meh :P it's liberation all the same.

If you're referring to text chat, then Adium is the alternative: no uglier than iChat.

If you're referring to video chat, the it's a losing battle trying to get Windows users to video chat over AIM. The last time I saw, the instructions to get video working on AIM was painfully long. There was an alternative in the payware version of Trillian. And the resulting video window was tiny. And it was unreliable. And I don't know if all the recent niceties with iChat video work when interacting with PCs.

IMHO, Skype has the best free cross-platform text and videochat.

So here's a Skype plug in for Adium:
http://myjobspace.co.nz/images/pidgin/

Still needs Skype to run in the background though.

why not just run skype then? :P