First of all, offline instant messaging. It’s actually pretty usable and handy. You can write quick comments to your friends and when they login they get them and can answer instantly with the im application adn we can continue chatting on that topic. No more forgeting to bring up a matter later.

The second is the audio/video support. I’m personally at this moment living in an other country than my wifey. With the outrageous roaming and phone rates and fixed price internet connection I’m using constantly either Skype or Messenger. That will save me monthly couple hundred euros of money.

Now, I could in theory use some other client for just the text based im stuff and then run also Skype/messenger for the rest. But that means I will be adding more constantly running applications and since the Skype/messenger already have the im features as well and the other parties have to run them as well, it is in overall pretty stupid solution.

File transfer is naturally also a must-have feature. Couldn’t really live without it.

What is furthermore very nice in Skype and Messenger is that they can work from behind extremely broken internet connections. They can handle silly nats and firewall setups made by incompetent network administrators quite fine, and just work. There are places where the other im/chat applications just break.

Yeah, if the jabber im applications were better I’d use them instantly and never look back. The fact that they lack some of the most important features for such applications have just always put me and many other people off.