I’ve been using the chat client Digsby for a while now, and it’s pretty awesome. It’s comparatively new (less than a year), but quite stable, feature complete, and adds a bunch of new features that simplify things substantially.

• Cleanly integrates with all the traditional instant messenging systems, adding gtalk, facebook chat, and twitter.
• Integrates mail and event notifications from almost any mail source, as well as facebook and myspace’s event feeds
• Free!
• Almost cross platform – the initial release is Windows only, but they’re releasing OS X and Linux versions soon
• Lets you neatly merge multiple accounts on different services belonging to the same person. Then, just tells you if they’re online on any service, and intelligently uses that one to communicate with them.

Given the proliferation of social networks and messaging networks, it’s quite nice to have one tool that bridges them. I don’t have to deal with the fact that not everyone uses the same tools – Digsby gives me a list of everyone, and when I want to talk with them, it just works.

I love tools that hide complexity without being simplistic.