Most of my friends only use MSN though (Score 2, Insightful)

Am I the only person here who's friends are exclusively on MSN? I am from Great Britain, and I have 33 friends who use Windows, and MSN (it only requires a Hotmail account so it is pretty staightfoward to use). I doubt that they will consider using anything else, cause most of their other friends are also on MSN. Part of the reason I didn't switch to Linux till recently is beacuse I thought that MSN was a Microsoft only thing, now I am happily chatting away on GAIM. But now it seems I am faced with two choices, give up instant messaging my friends (unless I can miraclously pesuade them all to use an alternative client such as Yahoo or AOL), or reluctantly go back to using Windoze...