>I use Trillian -- it's pretty much dead now though.

Dead may mean mature and stable. If it's still usable, may be worth a look.

>Take a look at this:
>http://www.sonork.com/
>
>I messed around with it quite a bit a while back. I was going to write a video chat piece for it but never got around to finishing it.

The lack of video is a showstopper for me - I want to see my grandchildren, and we often do family chats across four cities (half of them in the US). But the real turnoff is the use of fake cyrillic. Using И (i) to mean N and я (ya) to mean r is as disgusting as if I wrote "шћч" pretending I wrote "why".