Sunday, October 5, 2008

Messengers

One of my all time favourite timepass is to play with software.
After standing against chatting for years, I started chatting at the end of 3rd year (2nd semester). I chatted for nearly 7 days with only 2-3 hours of break. It was a very tiring and new experience. I didn't know the shortcuts, emoticons. But what messenger to use was the golden question.

Well lets list out a few good messengers:
1. Yahoo Messenger
2. MSN Messenger
3. Pidgin
4. Digsby
5. Trillian
6. Adium
7. Miranda
8. www.meebo.com
9. www.ebuddy.com
10. www.iloveim.com
11. Apple iChat
12. Google Talk

the list is very big, but lets stop here.

Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messenger are two really good messenger with a lot of good features. I hate both of them because of the nonsense features like BUZZ/nudge, audibles, etc.
These things are too disturbing. But the world uses it for the same reasons. :(
The audio and video chats are really great features and really easy to use.

My favourite messenger is Pidgin. It is a wonderful piece of software. It supports Bonjour (the protocol all the KLCE juniors use to chat among themselves), MSN, Yahoo, XMPP, Gtalk and many others. It's a multi-messenger. You can log in to all your accounts from one place.
You may say Yahoo messenger has the ability to allow multiple messenger. But there is a big difference, Yahoo Messenger gives different windows and tray icons for every account but in Pidgin its all in one place. Less windows, less trouble.
Pidgin is clean, simple. It has multiple plugins that make life easier. It doesn't blink or irritate you with popups (if you want you can activate these options).
Pidgin supports text replacement, doodle, file sharing, etc. It doesn't provide webcam or audio facilities and has no plans to implement them.

Kopete is another great messenger but only available for the folks on Linux/Unix. It has audio/video chat support. It is protected by KWallet. It has good interface and its default settings provide minimal disturbance while keep you informed about buddy's status/messages.

In order to make your life wonderful with smileys, you may want to install smiley themes for Yahoo/MSN as the smileys coming with Kopete or Pidgin is not upto the mark.

Trillian is a multi-messenger. I heard about it before I knew what messengers were. It has a free and a premium version. The reason I never tested it despite all the good rating is that it comes with ads and it asks me to install toolbar in Internet Explorer.

Adium is a messenger for Mac OS, it has very good rating. I have never used it.

Digsby is a flashy/glittering multi-messenger. Its different from others. How? It doesn't save your account details or chat log on your system but instead on its web server. So, if you move to a different computer, you can login using your digsby account(if that system has a digsby installed on it, very unlikely) and find all your accounts and logs there. It supports reading mails and replying to them without opening the mail account. It supports some social networking site like Facebook and MySpace. You can even chat with your facebook buddies without having to open the browser. Many other features.

Apple iChat is inbuilt messenger for Mac OS. It has a few features and because Bonjour is Apple's protocol, it is great with Bonjour.

Google Talk is something I have neither read nor used. It is among very few google services that I haven't used. But I expect it to be just as good as all other services that google provides.

Coming to web based messenger. My all time favourite is www.meebo.com
Its good. Really good, but gives a lot of network problems.

www.ebuddy.com is a great web based messenger. It loads a little slower but poses less network problem than meebo.com

www.iloveim.com is yet another great messenger.
Too bored to write about them :(
Leave comments on why this article is a crap.

P.S. : These are just a few messengers that I know. If your college has blocked them already, ask for more. I have a big database of web-based messengers ;)

2 comments:

  1. You left Empathy, the one Ubuntu developers are considering to replace pidgin with.

    For text based chat I recommend you pidgin for windows and Linux. It, in addition to supporting a lot of protocols, has lot many plugins which (when rightly configured) make your Instant Messaging a lot more fun.
    adium (based on the same 'libpurple' on which pidgin is based on) for Mac os x users.

    For A/V chats, go for Skype...THE BEST for that.

    Bonjour is just Apple's implementation (name) of zeroconf.

    iChat also allows you to do XMPP by default. You can have AIM buddies, special Apple .Mac accounts, and Jabber tooo

    You missed AIM messenger

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