Instant Messaging has come an awful long way since I began using it six years ago. Now, the programs that you spend hours on chatting with friends, colleagues, family and lovers no longer has to be boring.

This amazing tool that can be used to correspond with whomever, wherever, and whenever, can now be customized to different colour schemes, backgrounds, and even sounds, all to your tastes. Usually this is free, but many of the IM services want you to pay for their best emoticons.

Sounds reasonable, right? Well, it's not the route I recommend. Why pay for each pack of 4 or 6 emoticons when you can click here and get 10 000 emoticons and smileys, of amazing quality, for free? Especially when they'll work for AIM, MSN and Yahoo! They all come in one free download, are easily addable to your IM, and can be downloaded from the U.S, Canada, the U.K., as well as Internationally.

Why pay when you can get them free?