Friday TechTip for July 18, 2008: Multi-IM Clients and Services
Hi all, happy Friday and 5 weeks before the start of the fall semester! Today’s tip is inspired by a question from by one of our colleagues. He was curious about which multi-service instant messaging clients are considered to be the best. It’s very common for people nowadays to have IM accounts with AOL (AIM), Yahoo Messenger, Windows Messenger, Google Talk, etc. and also have friends that only use one service exclusively. This creates the need to have multiple pieces of software open in order to keep up with all of your friends and co-workers. Below are my recommendations to get around this problem and keep up with everyone you IM with in one place. Please note that you’ll have to have pre-existing accounts with each service you want to use before trying the applications below.
Meebo – (all operating systems, all browsers) Many of us in the library use Meebo on a daily basis for our Reference IM service (add BoatwrightInfo to your buddy list). Meebo is “portable” in that it’s a browser-based application. To access your IM accounts, just got to http://meebo.com. From there you can login to one of your existing services, OR if you want to have all of them available to you in one browser window you need to create a Meebo account and add all of your services. Once finished you’ll have access to all of your buddy lists in one place and can talk with your all of friends regardless of the service they’re using. Note that in order to provide free service, Meebo includes minimal advertising in the browser page which can easily be hidden.
Pidgin – Pidgin is an open source Windows application that you can download from http://pidgin.im. While installing, it will prompt you to add your accounts, and once completed you’ll be able to see all of your “buddies” and can simultaneously send messages to multiple services, just like Meebo.
Adium – Adium (http://adiumx.com) is Pidgin’s equivalent for the Macintosh and really quacks. 
Hope this helps to simplify your computing experience a little, have a good weekend!