IM Buddies on Multiple Clients (The Mighty Squid's Ink) by Mighty_Squid
One of the issues I've encountered in my many years on the net is collecting IM buddies on various clients. Between people you are or have worked with to friends and family and finally just the random people you talk to online it starts to add up and it becomes difficult to have all those clients open at once.So there are the third party client developers to the rescue. Some notables are Trillian, Pidgin (formally GAIM), Adium, Fire, and Meebo. These are notable mostly due to the fact I have used them but they are all fairly popular as well. A good comparison of many clients can be found here.
Trillian and Pidgin are both available for Win XP and that's the version I will be referring to. At the moment I prefer Pidgin to Trillian only do to the fact I have recently gained a few buddies that are only on Google Talk and the free version of Trillian does not include support for GT. The downside of Pidgin as I see it is that the standard interface is far from slick and easy on the eye. However both clients work extremely well for normal chatting. File exchanges as well as audio and video support is buggy or non-existent but that doesn't impact me on a day to day bases. I have all the major clients as well and I would normally disable a client on Trillian or Pidgin and open up the direct client to accomplish these tasks if needed.
Meebo is a web based client I have posted about before. It works well for what it is. Not particularly useful as a main client since I found it hard to tell when people IMed me being purely browser based but good in a pinch if you are at a different computer somewhere and you needed to IM someone quickly.
Adium and Fire are Mac OS X clients and both work very well but I have found myself using Adium for it's ease of use and cute duck logo. It also has a fairly slick interface with highlights such as when someone IMs you and you have another window open you can see the text of that IM transparently overlayed on your window (this feature requires Growl installed. However this is included in the install) The duck's eyes will also glow an evil red when you ignore the overlay which is a good reminder that there is someone waiting for a reply. I don't use my Mac often but when I do I choose Adium over iChat.
So for me Pidgin for XP or Linux, Adium for Mac, and Meebo for the web are my solutions for the challenge of multiple IM client needs. I recently purchased a Samsung Blackjack and intend to try out IM+ but I am not much of a road warrior and too cheap to buy it at the moment. It does have high reviews however.
Now if only someone would talk to me ..... Posted in: adium , fire im , gaim , im clients , im+ , meebo , pidgen , review , trillian