Inside Mac OS X 10.7 Lion’s iChat 6

Apple’s bundled instant messenger app, iChat 6, now adds Yahoo IM support. Unlike e-mail, the IM is partitioned into proprietary solos – like AOL, ICQ, Skype and many others – using their own systems for text and video chat. Hence, anyone who wants to exchange messages with users of different system must use a multi-protocol chat client.

But although iChat 6 only supports text chats in Yahoo IM, this builds a gateway for users to support both populations of Yahoo and MSN. In addition to this, it integrates separate chat accounts and protocols into a buddy list. It also features a coordinated login across all user-configured accounts. But don’t fuss! This feature can be disabled if you don’t want to share the same status for each IM client that you use.

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