You probably have your IM application set to automatically login to your different accounts as soon as it starts up, but what about when you want to chat without announcing your presence to the world. Macworld details a simple keyboard shortcut that will launch iChat or Adium without logging into any accounts. The trick: Just hold down the shift key when you launch your respective IM app. Doing so will start the app offline. From there you can log into whichever individual account you want and control your status ahead of time. I tried this trick on Pidgin and Digsby to no avail and searched for similar shortcuts without luck. (If you know the proper shortcut, let's hear it!) It's such a smart and simple shortcut, and having been exposed to it, you can't help but wonder why all IM apps don't have this option.

Popular cross-platform instant messaging application Pidgin released an update boasting a boatload of bug fixes that should improve the stability and day-to-day operation of Pidgin. If you want to see the entire list of changes in the most popular IM app on the block, you can find the entire changelog here.

Mac OS X only: Free Adium plug-in Challenge Response prevents instant messaging spam by requiring unknown users to answer a quick challenge question before interrupting you with their message. Challenges would look something like, "What is the square root of 49 in numerical form?" which requires a response of "7," but you can customise your own question and answer. Once a user answers correctly (i.e., verifies intelligence), Challenge/Response adds that user to a whitelist and they won't be challenged again. There's always the chance that the challenge and response might confuse an actual human enough that they'll just give up on IMing you, but if you're used to a lot of IM spam, Challenge/Response is a must. Challenge/Response is a free download, Mac OS X only, requires Adium. Thanks Jason!

When you want the latest update to an important RSS feed sent to you wherever you are, the moment it's published, give the Notify.me notification web service a try. Set up source feeds in Notify.me and have new items sent to you via instant message or email. I signed up for Notify.me two days ago and got no new items from my feeds for a day; then yesterday afternoon the IM bot kicked in and I was getting notifications of new feed updates faster than my check-every-15-minutes desktop feed reader. Suggested uses for Notify.me include job listings, social network updates, and search feeds.

Today Google starts rolling out voice and video chat inside Gmail—which requires a free browser plug-in download, and, obviously, a webcam. Googler Justin Uberti explains:

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We've considered social tracking service FriendFeed a pretty neat way to aggregate your online life, but now it's a lot easier to keep tabs on what's happening with your circle of net-connected friends, even if you hardly ever log in at FriendFeed's site. The service has just rolled out a Twitter-like IM integration, which can send updates when particular friends update their feeds, let you update your own feed and post messages to it, pull down the full entry when you get a stub notification, and many more tasks. Perhaps the most useful aspect is IM notification whenever your posts on any service get a comment, which you can reply to through your IM client. FriendFeed's IM tools require a Google Talk/Gmail or Jabber-compliant chat client.

Windows/Mac OS X only: Free application VoxOx is a combination of popular multi-protocol chat and social networking application Digsby and voice chat service Skype—or at least that's the idea. VoxOx claims to combine all of "today's main forms of communication into one snazzy interface." To its credit, VoxOx does offer a lot of worthwhile functionality. Like Digsby, it works with most popular IM networks, integrates with Facebook (though not MySpace or LinkedIn, which Digsby supports), and offers email integration. Like Skype, VoxOx gives you a phone number and allows you to make outgoing calls to any other phone and receive calls from your computer (you'll get a free phone number and 120 free minutes when you sign up). VoxOx even does video conferencing, call forwarding, file sharing, and integrated text messaging. Sounds pretty good, right?

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Send a batch of email, IM, SMS or even voice messages with Notifu. The site is designed as a iPhone webapp, but it'll work in any browser. Simply add a list of recipient email addresses, IM handles or text or voice phone numbers and send a message to a group of folks quickly and easily no matter how they prefer to be reached. Your typewritten message will be delivered to callers or voicemail via text-to-speech, and you don't need an IM account to send messages to AIM, Yahoo IM, GTalk or other chat clients. Sign up to register and you can save a set of contacts, get confirmation of message delivery and manage replies.

Popular open-source chat application Adium has released a small update packed with bug fixes, including better support for MSN Messenger, status updates, and more. If you're on OS X and you're not using Adium, it may be time you grab the latest and check out what makes Adium one of the five best instant messengers.

The Web Worker Daily weblog rounds up a handful of useful tweaks for using an instant messaging application at work without letting it ruin your productivity. For example:

Many IM programs allow you to be "invisible" to different contacts or contact groups when you come online. You can also be invisible to clients who rarely IM you anyway, and leave yourself visible for a few clients whose projects are more urgent. Taking advantage of your visibility settings can also come in handy if you use the same IM accounts for both personal and business contacts.

Instant messaging gets a bad rap in the workplace, but studies have suggested that instant messaging increases workplace productivity when compared to email, and IM can even reduce workplace interruptions. The catch: You need to know how to use IM effectively or the constant ding can ruin your productivity, and Web Worker Daily's list offers a nice take.

If you're on the hunt for a strong IM app, check out the five best instant messengers.