I started chatting, which was introduced to me by a friend, in 1998. The chat program of my choice for a very long time was MiRC, a text only chat program. I was hooked for many years, till 2005. I discovered Microsoft’s MSN Messenger in 1999 but it was limited to just a couple of cousins who lived abroad. However very soon many more relatives and many, many friends started using it and I would swap windows from MiRC & MSN.

I never did like Yahoo Messenger very much. I hardly used my Yahoo email id and it lapsed not long after I created it. I would renew it time and time again but I never used it much. I moved all my Yahoo Messenger contacts to MSN and made all my friends cancel my Yahoo id from their address book. Nothing against Yahoo’s other services but I just didn’t like their messenger and their search engine.

Google has dominated my world as a search engine since, I dunno, 1999? 2000. I have tried many search engines but Google just trumps them all. I started using Google exclusively and finally moved to Google Talk or GTalk a little over a year ago, just after I took my current pc and my broadband connection. GTalk rulz! I just love the way it looks and feels. This is the perfect chat program. It doesn’t take too much space, it doesn’t tac your computer’s memory and it’s cute. I have managed to move most of my contacts to Gtalk and most of my friends and relatives.

download virtuosity movie I still use MSN and auto-login to it every time I switch on my computer & broadband connection. I have a few contacts on it that still don’t use GTalk and hence that is the biggest reason for me to use MSN. I waver between not using it and logging in / out of to it from time to time. But then I would miss the contacts that I have there and that’s not something I want. But if I could get those people to move to GTalk as well, and I have done it to a handful, then I would only use GTalk.