Like most people who frequent the internet I use instant messaging to chat with a lot of my friends. The majority of IM users will tend to stick to one medium, be it MSN or AIM or Yahoo! or perhaps something else. I however have accounts on a number of different IM services so that I am more easily contactable, and so that I can easily chat with friends who only use a specific IM service. Obviously it would be silly to run three or four different programs which all do the same thing, so I have a piece of software called Trillian which combines all of the major IM protocols into one piece of software.
The trouble is, trillian can be quite annoying sometimes. The current version isn’t really being developed any more, and the new version costs money. As a result, I have embarked upon a search for a new multi-protocol IM program to use. I hadn’t realised there were quite so many, and after a bit of browsing around (mostly on wikipedia) I have downloaded five which all fit the criteria I set. Those criteria are as follows:
- Must support the big four (that is MSN, AIM, Yahoo! and ICQ).
- Must be for windows (this might seem silly, but there are some really good alternatives which are for Linux or Mac only)
- Must be free
- Must not do too much other crazy stuff (one program included a remote PC access tool for some bizarre reason)
So by those criteria I have selected these 5 programs to try out:
- Miranda IM – The most extensive of the five in terms of functionality, although it is still in version 0.7.7 (whatever that means)
- Pidgin – A cross platform offering which I have used before on linux
- Digsby – Includes tools to monitor social networking websites such as facebook and myspace
- Instantbird – A very young open source development, lacking in features but has potential
- Sim-IM – A very basic program, may be a little too spartan for my tastes
A review of each of the five will follow after I have taken the time to test them all out fully.