Get MSN into your iChat with Cocoon

Love it or hate it, MSN Messenger (or Live Messenger) is here to stay for some of us, especially for those of us in Canada and South America. When Americans were off getting their AOL accounts and using them for chat, the rest of us were rocking MSN Messenger accounts, and sadly, a handful of people that I know still use it, which means I can’t cut it out of my workflow just yet.

We’ve seen a few Jabber hacks to get MSN contacts into iChat, but all of them provide headaches that just weren’t worth it for me, but as of now you can use an iChat plugin called Cocoon.

The plugin still has some bugs but on the whole I can chat with those MSN users that refuse to get onto other chat programs (*ahem*Mom*ahem*). It’s a quick and easy install, and works for me in Lion. That being said, we’d recommend taking precautions like you would any other time you install a plugin and back up your stuff first. Just because it worked for me, doesn’t mean that it’ll work flawlessly for you.

Hat tip to Newton Mota for passing this along

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive.