The Good Computer Guy Blog :: Instant Messenger clients

Tags: Internet Software

Instant messaging has come a long way since its beginning. The focus today is on IM clients. Today, people talk on one or more of several different systems. The top three being AOL (or AIM), Yahoo, and Microsoft (formerly MSN Messenger, Live Messenger, etc.) Google Talk is also becoming more popular as more people use Gmail. So what do you do if you know people and want to communicate on all these different systems? I used to run all the different programs - I had 2 or 3 running in my task bar. What a pain, though. And what if you have more than one account on each system, say one for business and one for personal use?

A much better solution is to use a client that can log into multiple services. There are several good programs out there but I'm going to discuss only my 2 favorites. For many years I used Pidgin to log into 2 or 3 AOL accounts, 1 or 2 Yahoo accounts, an MSN account, and a couple of private client IM systems (called OpenFire.) Pidgin is great - lots of extra plug-ins, free, works on both Windows and Linux, connects to about 16 different services. But the development was starting to slow down and the application was getting a bit stale.

Enter one of the newer kids on the block, Digsby. Digsby is my new favorite. Very slick, current interface. It connects to all the main IM services and can even check your e-mail (Pidgin can do that too.) Digsby takes it a step further and can connect to social networking sites as well (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn) updating you on new content there. Finally, the "killer app" part for me - the Digsby Widget, which allows me to embed a version of the Digsby client right here on my blog. Look over in the right column and say hi if I'm around.

Comments

1 - Sounds cool! Chat sure has come a long way since the days of irc!

Posted by your friendly neighborhood computer guy At 11:19:52 AM On 10/16/2008 | - Website - |

2 - Not too sure if I like the idea that Digsby gets all my login info for all my IM's...

/Phil

Posted by Phil At 11:27:32 PM On 12/24/2008 | - Website - |

3 - Phil, I agree - that disturbed me too, at first. But I got over it and still think Digsby is the best one out there. And oh so useful when I install on another computer and don't have set up anything. Right now I have 9 IM accounts, 3 e-mail accounts, and 4 social networking accounts - that would all be a big pain to set up on different computers.

Bill

Posted by Bill Greenberg At 04:35:20 AM On 12/25/2008 | - Website - |