If you want cross service IM client. Wangophone is nowadays the most friendly one. It can connect you with gtalk, msn, yahoo, jabber, and of course ICQ. It come with cam feature. The best thing is: it is friendly to Linux guys. You even can call land phone from it. There is a very similar client called Gizmo which might be just a clone of Wangophone. You may study what Gizmo can do, and come with an idea.
Skype use public IP client as fast routing path. They handle delay pretty good, but stolen others computing resource as well as bandwidth is not so good nowadays.