Look, we know you've already got about two dozen chat clients installed on your computer so you can keep in touch with your contacts using instant messengers from Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL, and other services (seriously haven't you ever heard of Pidgin?) But the latest entry in the instant messaging game is actually worth taking a look at.

Social.im is an instant messaging client that lets you chat with your Facebook contacts. The idea is that while your friends may use any number of different chat clients, there's a good chance they use Facebook. We don't know if that's true, but the first time we ran Social.im 60+ names showed up in our contact list, which is something we can't say for any other new instant messaging service we've ever tried.

What makes Social.im different from all the Facebook applications that let you chat with your contacts is that you don't run Social.im in a web browser window. Rather it's a standalone program that logs into your Facebook account sans web browser. Of course, your friends need to download and install the client before you can chat with them, but Social.im makes it easy to send messages to your friends letting them know about the service. You know, if you want to be that guy.

As a chat client, Social.im is pretty basic. There's no file transfer or image sharing features. There's no voice chat. But the client does include a status bar letting you know if you've received any new Facebook messages, pokes, friend requests, or wall posts since your last login. Clicking on the icons brings up Facebook in a web browser. It would be nice if you could also right click on a contact's name to bring up their page in a web browser, but this is still an early release.

Social.im is available for Windows only at the moment, but a Mac version is coming soon.

[via VentureBeat]