I (and many of my friends) have been using Facebook "Messenger" on Windows for years.

You can just add your account in Pidgin: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/12527/easily-add-facebook-cha...

Then you can even use your other IM clients: Google Talk, MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ (ahem)

Pidgin really sucks, trust me. I have used that for 3 years. Although there is no better app. But as Facebook releases its native and sexy Messenger for windows - its gonna be break through!

It's been out for a while - Facebook prompted me near the beginning of March to install it. It works well enough, though sending messages is a bit laggy. My biggest complaint is it's memory usage though - it must have a huge memory leak since after a day or two it's memory usage is huge (bigger than the whole of Chrome, where I have many tabs open, vs. it which is just running in the background with nothing showing).

There's been a beta of it out for a while, pretty sure. Since like December. IMHO, it's shitty and really looks like web views thrown in an EXE wrapper.

It's built in to win8, in the Messages app.

Look's like a minimalist AIM with no adds.

AIM is (or "was", given they're gonna shut it down) anything, but minimalistic - AIM is bloated and ugly. Facebook Messenger is nowhere close to AIM, but is super close to what the ideal Instant Messengers should be.