Fring streamlines your contacts, Slick kills bugs

fring

Instant messenger and VoIP application fring lets you chat and call on Skype and standard SIP VoIP, GoogleTalk, MSN (Windows Live), ICQ, Yahoo, AIM, Twitter, and social networking sites like Facebook and orkut. Fring is also a GMail notifier, last.fm radio, Facebook tool, Twitter application, and it includes WeFi, a tool to find free Wi-Fi hotspots.

Update: fring is no longer a multi-network messenger. They kicked 'em all out, fring now only works on it's own fring network. My advice: don't use fring.

The new fring update lets you unclutter your contacts list by grouping similar contacts on different networks under one single entry.

• fring


Slick

Multi network instant messaging client Slick connects to GoogleTalk and other Jabber networks, and to MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, and AIM. It has file transfer but not voice chat.

The latest updates don't offer more features, but some minor bugs were fixed.

Slick is free while beta testing lasts. But with so many free alternatives it's hard to believe that Slick will ever cost money.

• Slick