Well, the latest craze to hit the Linux bloggers is talking about Empathy.  Everyone is talking about it.  It’s apparently going to be in the next version of Gnome and Ubuntu is considering replacing Pidgin with Empathy for the next release.  First of all, depending on how much work is done on Empathy between now and then, I think this may be a bad idea.  Ubuntu is the distro we give our Linux n00b friends to play with.  Pidgin can do (more or less) everything Trillian can do (and definitely everything AIM can do - except voice/vid).  Do we want them thinking that Linux is crap because they are using the feature incomplete Empathy?