I honestly don't have time to do that sort of stuff with work and all.
Foruming is good enough for now.
In my experience, foruming is less conductive to multitasking than MSN/etc. is. Foruming is less productive than MSN/etc. since you can't multitask quite as well (well, you can, but you usually want to finish a post, or read other posts and shit all at once, as opposed to only having to read the little bit that they posted whenever they said something on MSN...)
Either way... I just like having people on MSN as well since I'm not always on s.net, and it's easier to keep MSN open in the background than it is to constantly check s.net (which is why I don't have as much time logged as some people here...)