Meebo new? Not really. Fun… certainly. Since Meebo has some “new features” in the way of instant messaging clients, namely integrating with my WordPress blog, I thought I would take a new look at the current set of tools out there. This post dives into my review of some of the tools and what conclusions I have made in my IM/Chat client choices -DV

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I have been Inter-netting since about 1990 or so. Back then I was in college reading newsgroups and getting the first glimpses of Mosaic. I also was an expert with xtalk, and then ytalk, a multi-user way of chatting with a few friends in one chat session. I actually heard the first tortured sound of the then Internet users, when commercial enterprises – symbolized by gazillions of America-On-Line (AOL) users – made their leap on to the Internet. It wasn’t long after that initial scream that I installed my first Instant Message (IM) account with AOL to chat with those “early adopters” in my family.

Since those days, as different people from different parts of my life had decided to enter into the Internet lifestyle, I have slowly signed up for multiple IM services. Those chat service sign-ups were based on which friend decided to get on the Internet in what year and how they wanted to “chat”. It was usually much easier for me to add another IM client than to instruct, usually through e-mail, that friend or family member a different client than they were using. So you name it, by now I have had almost all the IM clients in one form or other.

Cross-Service Chat Clients – Single Sign-On IM Style

My first multi-service chat client was Trillian. Trillian allowed me to connect to my AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and ICQ, chat friends and family through one software program (interface) with out having to open up all four chat clients. It worked pretty good. I could sign on to all of my major chat services in one shot and see all of my chat-migos in one window. In those days Trillian needed to have the original chat clients installed on my computer, but it still beat opening each chat client and signing in on each separately. These days chat clients and services have changed a lot under from the old days of requiring each client installed, which is nice, but things like file transfer, video and voice integration still seems to be challenge.

There are many many cross chat service clients out there. Doing a search, I have found a list of tools that look like they perform the same cross chat service functionality. Here is a list on Wikipedia, look at the “type” column with the entry “multi-protocol.” I certainly don’t care to try all of these but I thought I would pick and choose based on those clients I have heard of. I wanted to choose one freeware, one open source, and one browser based client to get an idea of what feature set would be purposeful to me these days. I also wanted to see if there is much of a difference for each of these types of client.

The following list are the cross-service chat clients that I played with recently. I will follow this list with a small chart of functionality that is neat or important to me:

Trillian 3.1 Basic (Freeware Version)

Trillian is a good tool, and it has a free version. It is quick to down load and setup, it also has increased the functionality that includes things like file transfer, and voice chat. It also allows a very detailed configuration of each type of chat client. This is nice because it uses instead of a generic features set that crosses all of its chat clients, it allows you to use more of the client specific feature set. (For example, if you like a specific Yahoo chat feature that the AOL client does not have, Trillian will probably allow the configuration of that Yahoo feature for chatting with your Yahoo chat friends.

Overall, I think Trillian is the most full featured of the three free tools I used. It has all the things that I like, with the exception of one. The ones it has are E-mail notification, I can set myself invisible, the fine tuning configuration of chat client, and there seems to be a portable version available (although I have not tried it). The one disappointment that I found in Trillian us that it uses the free tool Aspell library for it’s spell checking, only it is not available in the free version of the Trillian product. Oh well… guess you have to pay for something. I have also tried the file transfer and video/voice with a Yahoo chat buddy of mine. Doesn’t seem to work out of the box, even with my virus checking off… oh well. I guess you still have to use the original chat programs to do more than just text chat it seems.

If anyone knows the secrets of getting the file transfer/voice/video to work with Trillian (other than pay for the more full-featured client, please comment and let me know.)

PidginGiam 2.4.2 (Open Source – Free)

Another cross IM service client that has actually been around longer than Trillian was called Giam; it currently seems to go by the name Pidgin. This product, unlike Trillian, is open source. It doesn’t have all the features of Trillian but It does has a host of IM and Chat protocols that Trillian doesn’t. Some of these protocols I have not used or heard of (oh joy!)

It does seem like Pidgin is just a chat and file transfer program (I have not tried the file transfer) – there is no voice or video chat feature (or a a feature that looks like it). It also appears not to allow you to sign-on as invisible. It does have a spell check you can install and use. Of the three of these functionality, I have used “sign in as invisible” the most, which has had some unintended consequences but I will leave that story to a different post.)

It does have a spell check (using the Aspell GPL library), which is a nice feature. Overall for me the Pidgen client seems too bare bones. If I’m going to download and install a client I’m probably going to use the Trillian one.

Meebo – Free in Browser

Meebo is a cross-service Chat Client that is browser based; it works using AJAX technology. This is the first time I have used Meebo, and true to my Web 2.0 research I wanted to see what new functionality some of these new services can supply, at least in the way of collaboration.

Meebo has chat room capabilities so it could fit in with my web 2.0 client sensibilities. It does not have any thick client functionality, so chat logging is actually captured on the Meebo servers and not locally to your computer (certainly some pros/cons to that).

Meebo has a neat widget that works with my WordPress blog. This allows my blog readers to anonymously chat with me from my blog page (and the other way around). This is a feature I have added to my blog. Feel free to use it if you see I am online. This feature expects that I am logged into meebo, and will show if I am online to my blog readers.

Here is a picture of my blog with the Meebo chat widget. You should see the widget currently on the right pane of this blog (just click the small green dot – in the top right hand corner of the widget – and you can see if I’m online.):

Meebo has a firefox extension which is nice (side bar), and although does not have a spell check on its own, it works really well with the firefox add-in spell check.

Meebo doesn’t do IRC.

Meebo doesn’t have e-mail notifications, which for me, makes meebo a little bit more limited. Also file transfer/voice/video chatting does not seem to be working. Since I don’t do much video/audio chat, not having this feature is not a horrible thing.

Overall Comparison/Findings:

It appears that I’m a mix in both wanting full features of the original thick client versions and the quick ability to use the application from a browser from anyone of my computers without an installation.

What will Dharma Do?

Probably use a combination of Meebo (to play with integration with WordPress), use Trillian when I want to be online to all chat clients (or chat with multiple people on different chat services), or just sign in with MSN, so I can get notifications for e-mail for my MSN account (this is my usual modus operandi). Right now I want to see if anyone uses the chat widget on the blog to chat with me… that should be weird and interesting…

Happy Chatting…. -DV

Articles that may interest you:

Other tools that I have tried

What Hardware and OS is Dharma V. Using?

Download and Try Trillian

Download and Try Pidgin

Sign-up for and Try Meebo