Why?

• The default (microsoft) client is horrible, so you have to use a different client like pidgin
• My account was created way back when you had to use a hotmail account to do it, and having a hotmail account is actually quite embarrassing.
• It’s a closed format, so when Microsoft changes something, all the clients that does not sucks breaks, and closed formats are ideologically incompatible with the concept of a free and open Internet.
• I hate Microsoft, and by the laws of transitivity everything they make.
• By using the Live Messenger protocol, you can only talk to other users of MSN live messenger. Using Live Messenger is like having a Hotmail account that you can only use to send/receive emails from other Hotmail users. Nobody would use such a limited and retarded mail service, but for some reason people are OK with using a IM service that works like this.

The alternative

The only viable alternative was to go with XMPP, which is an open and standardized protocol which anyone can use. XMPP is pretty much like email, anyone can set up a server and anyone who has an XMPP account can contact anyone else who has a XMPP account no matter which server they use.

The choice of server was between jabber.org or Google (there are thousands of other XMPP servers you can use, but these are the largest ones), but since jabber.org’s registration page was down while they were moving their servers, and I already have a Google chat account (which uses XMPP), the choice was pretty simple