Instant Messaging

Posted on January 23, 2005 No Comments

I use Instant Messaging very often throughout the day. I use it to quick bounce off ideas or questions to team members, keep in touch with my wife, on line meetings, quick howdys to friends (all over the world), plan gaming strats, etc. etc. etc. Of course, to keep it interesting, there are many different IM networks/clients and they pretty much aren’t compatible. Thus, you find yourself running MSN Messenger for one set of people, AOL Instant Messenger for another, Yahoo! and ICQ for others. And those are just the 4 ‘big’ networks, there are many others. Handy stuff, but running all those clients can take up some resources…

A couple years ago I started playing with Trillian and was pretty much hooked on the concept. Here was ONE application that would run as all 4 of the afore-mentioned clients plus several others. I used it for quite some time. It was skinnable and generally did all that I needed. I don’t recall if I ever was able to send/receive files with it and I think there were issues with smilies, but… in general it worked.

About 6 months ago I came across a reference to Miranda IM. I almost immediately switched over to it. To be honest, I don’t exactly recall why, but I think I noticed that it used much less memory. Like Trillian, it supports plugins and various other nifty things and generally works pretty well. File movement is pretty iffy, a pretty common gripe.

Today, for grins, I decided to have a look at Gaim. Again, one application to manage all your IM’ing, support for all sorts of stuff. As of this writing I’m already all switched over to it. I LOVE the tabbed conversations - instead of one window per chat, you have one window with tabs per chats - much cleaner and easier (at least for me) to work with and keep straight. Also has one little feature that I totally fell in love with. A plugin (that comes with it) called “History.” Turn this bad boy on and when someone sends you an IM, the window pops up with the last few lines of your last conversation with that person. Now to me that is just the handiest thing ever! Really helps with quickly getting context when a message seems to appear out of the blue. File sending and receiving seems troublesome as ever, but it does work with MSN Messenger at least. And that’s where the majority of my work contacts are so I’m happy. (the work-around of course is if you know a file is coming quick fire up the ‘real’ IM client).

So yeah, tabbed conversations and “History” and BAM I’m hooked. I’m just that easy. But give it a look - it has come a long ways since the last time I used it (2 years ago when I was full time Linux at home). A very long ways.