They're killing the client. Messenger accounts continue to work, and users can sign in to the Skype client with their existing Messenger credentials. Messenger will be run on the same infrastructure as before, not on the Skype peer-to-peer model. As far as I can tell, third-party clients should continue to work as well.

I thought the protocol used a central server for transferring contact information between users. If they shutdown those severs, then pidgin's msn implementation wont do us any good.

Found some more info about this at http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/micros... .Apparently the won't kill the servers too so there's still hope of continuing with pidgin.