Well I had that problem until gtalk appeared. From that day on they do not have any excuse.
It was hard to make your friends to move to jabber, but with gtalk I can say to them: well, I have skype, jabber and a gmail account (gtalk is jabber anyway) so if you need to reach me you can use one of those, if it is not enough, we understand :-P

The great thing is that they started to change to gtalk and skype :-D

