Ichat problem

[SBD]

My friends in Hawaii and I (in New Zealand) have ichatted beautifully before on our macbook pro's, but now the .mac account's have expired and we don't want to pay for the pleasure, we have both got ourselves AIM screen names to use with ichat instead.
This should work sweet (if you believe everything you read), but we both recieve an error when connecting.
After initiating the chat and establishing a connection the program responds with "(user name) failed to respond", user name being our own computer!!
Any ideas, or similar problems solved??
Thanks :confused:

[Namslas90]

Try Skype for MAC. it's also free!

http://www.skype.com/download/

[SBD]

Thanks.
I've got it and it works, but the quality of ichat seems better, so really keen to get it going.
Thanks again though:)

[Wile E]

If you're not concerned about video/audio chatting, you can give Adium (http://www.adiumx.com/) a try. But if video/audio is your concern, I'm sorry to say that I don't actually use iChat on my Mac, so I can't help you.

[SBD]

Thanks anyway Wile E.

[Dippyskoodlez]

Thanks.
I've got it and it works, but the quality of ichat seems better, so really keen to get it going.
Thanks again though:)

I believe this is a conflict with AIM's piss poor protocols.

Try yahoo, or Google maybe.