There's such a variety of instant messaging clients today that it's hard to keep up. Adium lets you work from your Mac and stay in touch with family and friends that are on a variety of IM networks. With support for ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk and more, Adium is a perfect choice for coping with IM overload.

When you have contacts that all use different instant messaging networks it can be hard to stay in touch. Enter Adium. You can add all your contacts from a wide variety of messaging services and have everyone in one easy-to-use interface. Adium is a great way to manage multiple IM clients, all in one place.

Adium makes it easy to chat with family and friends across a wide range of instant messaging networks. You can talk back and forth, use emoticons to express your feelings, add hyperlinks to your messages, change the font, the font color and more. Adium makes it fun to chat with all of your contacts.

Some people like to use software just the way it comes. Others like to alter it so it works the way they want it to. Adium gives you plenty of options you can change to customize and tweak Adium so it works the way you like to work. From the way it responds in your absence to the colors of messages, Adium lets you decide.

Whether it's the sales report for an upcoming meeting or a photo set from a recent vacation, sometimes you want to send and receive files via instant message. Transferring files over instant message is especially handy when the file in question is too big to send in email. Whatever it is you need to send, Adium makes it easy with its quick and simple file transfer utility.

Sometimes it's handy to have a record of what you chat about. If your chat is work-related you can prove that your boss didn't tell you to work overtime. If it's personal you can go back in and find out what time the family picnic is on Saturday. If you log chats in Adium you can use the Transcripts function to go back and see what was said, and by whom.

Some people are really good at multitasking. Some people get overwhelmed by too much action on their desktop. Luckily, Adium gives you some great ways to manage multiple chats whether you're a great multitasker or not. You can nest chats in one window or have each chat in its own window; the choice is yours.

Many computer users don't realize what a weak spot instant messenger clients are as far as security. You're sending information out across the Internet where any that's really knowledgeable could potentially snag it. Adium, however, gives you a way to encrypt chats so they are secure. Sure, you may not be talking about top secret stuff, but at least you know that what you do say is secure.

When you're online you may be just browsing around. You may be working, you may feel like chatting with your friends or you may not have time. For this reason Adium makes it easy to quickly convey your status to all of your contacts. They know when you're available and they know when you're not.

In an earlier segment we talked about how you could make Adium look the way you want it to by modifying colors and the like. The Xtras Manager, however, helps you to take Adium to a new level of customization. Nearly every aspect of Adium can be customized and altered to be just the way you want.

With so many

instant messaging services

out there, how do you keep track of all your friends and associates across all the IM services on your Mac? With

Adium

you can connect to all your instant messaging friends, regardless of their preferred IM. Add friends from ICQ, Windows Live (MSN), AIM, Google Talk and many more. Michael "Doc" Callahan shows us how to keep track and provides some valuable power-user tips along the way.