Although its name sounds like that of a bacterium, Coccinella is a nice cross-platform open source Jabber client. While Jabber, and IM clients in general, are a dime a dozen, Coccinella sports a few nifty features that make it worth considering.

For starters, Coccinella is refreshingly easy to install. Actually, you don't need to install anything at all: simply unpack the downloaded archive and launch the Coccinella executable. When you launch Coccinella for the first time, a setup wizard helps you to configure the client and create a new Jabber account, if needed.

Coccinella supports multiple user profiles, so you can set up several accounts with different Jabber servers. More importantly, Coccinella supports the Google Talk protocol, which means that you can use it to communicate with Gmail users, provided you have a Gmail account.

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