Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Are u Gaim ?

I have been on a roll trying out different messengers, i dont
know why, thought it might be of some interest to people
having urges to use something different if not atleast new.

MSN n Yahoo have always been there, initially it was MSN
that people used more, now it seems like Yahoo rules with
its new feature rich, glassy look messenger. But i think MS
wouldnt be far off in delivering a one step ahead msgr. But
as far as i know of the situation hordes have shifted from
MSN to yahoo.

But for those who look for usable (a very controversial term)
features will surely opt for other players in the arena. The
biggest drawback of these branded messengers is that
very few people write plugins for them, and it is these plugins
that make all the difference.

On Windows there are a lot of third party messengers that
support a lot of protocols.So u have a single app running for
msn, yahoo, gadu-gadu, irc, aol, jabber,..... . Theres Trillian,
which has looks n skins better than any messenger available.
Its one of the most customisable msgrs i have seen. Then
theres Miranda, small lightweight & has truckloads of plugins,
including one of an AI bot that you can use when your
away or just want to eat, no chew somebuddys head.

In the *nix world theres the open source all famous Gaim.
Those of you who think its bland n sad you probably dont
know how to use it. Try some of its plugins
> Guitifications -- that small window that pops up in the right
bottom, every now n then
> AI bot
> Rss Reader !
> Blogger posting --- rocks.

N offcourse its been ported to Win32, alongwith most of the
plugins.If u wanna try some fancy try Kopete. It comes bundled
with KDE. It has a very customised notification system.

N i think Google will come out with a surprising app, thats based
on what i saw in Hello, their msgr to post pics to Blogger, it
sure has a lot of potential.

Category [ _Tech_ ] [ _Review_ ]

1 comment:

Niranjan Tulpule said...

Google messenger or Google IM as people might want to call it, is believed to be an XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) based messenger. I think Google will be the only major IM provider who goes the XMPP way. All the big guns like MSN, AOL et all have put their weight behind SIP/SIMPLE. Actually Microsoft is a lot gung-ho about SIP/SIMPLE and it is promoting it in a big way in its LCS 2005 Enterprise IM.

What I believe Google IM might be targetting is to use the IM traffic to generate ads, similar to what it does in GMAIL. We will find out only when Google comes out of stealth mode.