With the help of the skinnable-in-every-way duck, Adium (kids, don’t skin ducks), chatting has always been a task that could be spruced up with a little customized magic. Still, the release of 3 different and yet equally pleasing customizations for various chatting apps remains an enormous coincidence— one we can’t overlook.

The first is a contact list style released earlier this week for Adium whose simple minimalist tone looks good on almost any desk. The opaque black slab simply melds into whatever wall you have unobtrusively. Forum user prelude6×6 seemed to find the right level of opacity so that the list is invisible when your focus is elsewhere yet can be found instantly when the need arises.

Two days later, forum member Jvstin unveiled a replacement icon for the Chinese chat app Fetion. Fetion’s icon takes the oft-used smiley face metaphor for chat app icons but excises those useless eyes, leaving a gaping mouth and a weird collar/swoosh below the face. It’s an oddly compelling look made only better by Jvstin’s Aqua treatment, but one that doesn’t have many uses. But fellow community members PimPamPet and allan.nyholm found one use for the icon: Adium. So they whipped up two whole icon sets. PimPamPet’s can be found here and allan.nyholm’s here.

Yet Adium can’t have all the fun. Forum member cmyk.designs, after “having some fun in photoshop,” released iChat of Doom, a replacement icon for, of course, iChat. The icon takes the color scheme of the marble/beachball/spinny of doom and transplants it into an iChat bubble-style icon. The result is a colorful and snarky icon perfect as a quick reminder in the dock for you to keep your cool when confronted with an indefinite beachball spin of your own.

Coincidence or not, I think we can all agree this deluge of chat-related customization is good for everybody who chats—which, let’s be frank, is just about everybody.