OMG did u hear the newz?

Forget mobile IM apps, BeejiveIM chats circles around most desktop IM clients. This versatile messaging app lets you keep in touch with all of your far flung friends across one or more accounts with AIM/MobileMe, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, Jabber, and MySpaceIM. To organize this hodgepodge of buddy info, you can either sort them by accounts or groups within a very iChat-inspired interface. Plus, you can compile a favorites list of all your BFFs from any service.

Once you've got all your accounts logged in, there are tons of options available in the iPhone's settings menu. You can easily tweak everything from the color of incoming or outgoing IM bubbles, hidden offline buddies, and sound or vibrations alerts--although you can't set custom sounds for different people. Turn off off auto-spelling and auto-capitalization to type in txtspeek. There are even some nifty iPhone-centric tricks such as shaking the handset to switch between conversations and rotating into landscape mode for a wide angle.

But the key drawback to instant messaging on any iPhone, regardless of IM client, is that the device doesn't currently support background apps; you can't receive IMs once you've closed the program. Beejive circumvents this limitation by allowing you to keep your screen names signed in and notify you of any IMs via email. You can even set Beejive to log you out after a set period of inactivity. While that's not an ideal solution, it's a reasonable work-around.