Stay in touch with friends on Facebook, AIM, Jabber and Sip with Jitsi

There are quite a few open source instant messaging programs. Jitsi is a little different because it can be used with online SIP accounts to make audio calls.

Installation very simple. There's an option to have it start with Windows but this isn't selected by default.

After installation has finished a screen appears for the user names and passwords of the eight services it supports: SIP, Jabber, Facebook, Google Talk, MSN, AIM, ICQ and Yahoo.

All your contacts are then displayed in one place along with their profile pictures and markings as to whether they are online or not.

It's a shame that it isn't possible to start a conversation by double-clicking on a contact. Instead, you have to click on them once and then on the speech bubble.

Despite this, Jitsi is a good chat program, especially if you have a SIP voice call account.

Jitsi is available for Mac and Linux as well as Windows from the Jitsi download page.