I've been searching for something like this for a long time and haven't found anything similar to BBM. I do use an app called WhatsApp (http://www.whatsapp.com/

I've been searching for something like this for a long time and haven't found anything similar to BBM. I do use an app called WhatsApp (http://www.whatsapp.com/ http://www.whatsapp.com/) which gives you free text messaging capabilities via your 3G connection; so I can text to groups of my friends, and those over in the UK without being hit by texting fees, especially the pricey international ones. But there's still much to be desired, and seeing as BBM is a major point of attraction for users to choose BB over the iPhone, Apple should follow suit with a similar system. Ideally, we'd have a BBM type system accessible to all phones.