Meta contacts are one of the features of Kopete that make sense once you figure out what they are. Until you do, they annoy you. They are basically a way of taking a contact on one network (such as MSN) and linking it to another contact on a different network. This is useful for when people have accounts on different networks as you can chat to them without needing to know which account they are signed on to. This also lets you assign names to your meta-contacts that don't change when people change their names on their account, this is useful if you have contacts who insist upon setting their MSN nick to something like “=EF=81=8A”.

You can do other useful things with meta-contacts like link them to entries in your address book. See the section called “Linking email and messaging”