I use iChat all day long to chat with my coworkers on my Bonjour local network at the office, but the people I really care about chatting with are my friends on Facebook and Gmail. For that, I have to keep Facebook and Gmail open all day, but that doesn’t look too professional. Is there an app that lets me combine these into one window?

Many people only know iChat for its AOL Instant Messenger and Bonjour chats, but it does more than that. Facebook and Google Talk (the chat service included with Gmail) both use Jabber, which is an open instant-messaging protocol that iChat supports. To add these accounts to iChat, choose iChat > Preferences, click the Accounts button in the toolbar, and then click the plus sign in the lower left.

For your Gmail account, choose Google Talk or Jabber as your Account Type, then type in your full Gmail address as your account name. Type in your Gmail password and click Done.

You may not have realized it, but you can actually use iChat to chat with all your Facebook friends.

For your Facebook account, choose Jabber as your Account Type, then type in yourfacebookusername@chat.facebook.com for your account name. Type in your Facebook password. Click on the triangle for Server Options and type chat.facebook.com for the server and 5222 for the port. Then click Done.

Still, while iChat lets you exchange IMs with your Gmail and Facebook contacts, it still shows you a separate contacts window for each account: Bonjour, AIM, Google Talk, and Facebook. A free iChat plug-in called Chax (donations accepted, ksuther.com/chax/) includes an option for unifying all your chat accounts into one contacts window.

And if you’re really serious about chatting, Adium (donations accepted, adium.im) lets you combine 15 IM services--including Google Talk, Facebook, AIM, MSN, and Yahoo--into one unified window with no plug-ins required. We think it’s even easier to use than iChat.