A variety of multiclient instant-messaging services have cropped up that allow users to communicate with each other over the Web. Some can be downloaded onto your desktop, while others can be accessed on the Internet. In either case, they're worth trying out, if you want to enjoy a fine experience communicating with your friends.
Multiclient IM resources
Adium Adium is my favorite multiclient instant-messaging tool for a few reasons. It supports practically any IM platform around, including AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Facebook, MySpace, Google Talk (via Jabber), and more. It even has a plug-in for Skype.
You'll rarely have any trouble communicating with friends in the service. But its most redeeming quality is that it's open source. So, if you want to modify the code to fit your own IM desires, that's possible. And those in the open-source community are constantly improving the product, whose updates typically install with ease.
When you download Adium (it's available for Mac OS X), you'll have the option of choosing your IM service. By default, Adium takes on the same design as Mac OS X. But with the help of some plug-ins from Adium's site, called "Xtras," you can customize it as you see fit. Those add-ons include emoticons, dock icons, scripts, and more. I could go on about Adium, but I think that you get the point: if you're a Mac OS X user, it's worth trying out.
Adium takes on the look of Mac OS X by default.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Digsby Digsby is a multifaceted tool that lets you communicate with friends over instant messaging, e-mail, or social networks. I recently took a look at its social-networking capabilities. After having the opportunity to use its IM services, I was just as impressed.
After installing Digsby on my Windows PC (Mac and Linux versions are reportedly on the way), I was able to log in to my accounts on AIM, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, and others. Digsby's app is designed well, with a more attractive interface than Adium's default skin. Digsby also gives you the option of sending an SMS text message from the application. Overall, I liked Digsby.
Digsby lets you chat with anyone at any time.
(Credit: Digsby)
Instant-messaging service Meebo announced on Thursday that it has inked a deal with Hearst Magazines Digital Media that will bring its Meebo Rooms chat tools to the sites of glossies such as Popular Mechanics and Seventeen.
"Meebo is excited to provide readers of Seventeen.com and other Hearst Magazines Digital Media Web sites with a live forum to chat with people who share similar interests and differing opinions," Martin Green, chief operating officer at Meebo, said in a statement.
In tandem with the partnership announcement, Seventeen.com integrated Meebo's technology into its "Style Stars 2008" feature to allow visitors to browse photos, read articles, and watch videos of celebrities while they chatted in real time with others on the site. Hearst believes that the chatting-while-browsing formula will generate a lively community around its properties and help engage audiences more effectively.
And so far, the company is pleased with the results. According to its own figures, Popular Mechanics generated more than 20,000 lines of conversation in the first 48 hours from a single online article, and the Meebo chat room associated with it was loaded about 70,000 times by 30,000 unique visitors.
Meebo's ability to bring its embeddable chat rooms to Hearst is a major victory for the instant-messaging specialist. Although it is largely competing against the likes of Yoomba and eBuddy to serve as a log-in hub for outside messaging services such as those of AOL, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft, embedding chat rooms into other sites makes it unique and adds a new angle for revenue generation that its competitors simply don't have. And if its Meebo Rooms catch on, it could find itself in an extremely lucrative position.
eBuddy is a strange mix of a typical Web company. While the lowercase "e" in front of the name might suggest it's a survivor of the early 1990s dot-com boom, it actually started out in 2003 and resides not in the Silicon Valley, but Amsterdam. It's also one of the few companies I've seen that has put almost its entire press kit on Flickr. eBuddy specializes in Web-based IM, which might sound familiar if you've ever used Meebo or the Web version of your favorite chat client. eBuddy works with three of the major clients, including AIM, MSN, and Yahoo. The latest release, which came earlier this month, runs all three at once.
IM on your iPhone, with eBuddy.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Besides running on your browser, in the last two months eBuddy has been moving into the mobile space. It has a handy Java-based client that will run in nearly every phone, along with a version you can point to with your mobile browser. Just a few days ago this mobile version was optimized for the iPhone in order to get it to work with the Safari browser.
I spent a few minutes with it this morning, and came away impressed. iPhone users get a scrollable buddy list and tabbed chat windows. The buddy text is easy to read, and if you need to come in closer you can simply pinch. Instead of relying on a scroll bar to browse through your contacts, you just hold two fingers to drag it up or down. This worked some of the time, but more often it would simply scroll the entire page instead. You can also use this two-fingered scroll to read the contents of an IM conversation.
The chat interface itself is really simple, including the input box, which gives you a rather large selection of emoticons in case you feel like skipping the typing. If you need to jump back to the buddy list, you can do it from any window, which is helpful. All in all, it's a very simple solution for IMing on the go, and one of the better ones I've seen thus far.
Related: iPhone IM arms race ramping up; Trillian coming soon
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