<p>I guess, Meister. I only use MSN and use Adium. It's just a matter of what you personally prefer. =]</p>
<p>i dont think iChat looks nice. Adium is the Firefox of messengers. it is extremely customizable. there are different skins for your buddy list and message boxes, and some are really cool. you can make your buddy list transparent with your desktop, change the space between the names, change the font of the names, and tons of other stuff. there are lots of sound sets as well, such as Napoloen Dynamite (when you get a message its says "sweeeet") and Super Mario Brothers (coin sounds and get big sounds).</p>
<p>It's taking a little to figure out, but I think I really like Adium!</p>
<p>I just like the fact that when you chat, little bubbles come up rather than just a stream of text. Makes it alot more approachable.</p>
<p>you can have that behavior on Adium. there are literally iChat message styles that look exactly the same. well, why go to the extra effort to install adium's xtras to get the same thing by default on iChat? you get a lot of other stuff, too. the best things are making adium really small/transparent, insane amount of xtras (come on, you can have a darth vader dock icon!), and an actual community on adium's site (forum, scripts, and documentation).</p>
<p>Nobody uses ICQ anymore :(</p>