June 21st, 2004

Filed under:
Technical Writing
10 Comments »

Back on the IM Horse

For no particular reason, I have been using instant messenger for about a year. I used it quite a bit when I worked fulltime for this company, because our developers were spread all over the globe. Since then, I’ve pretty much ignored it. Which is odd, because you’d think that, working from home, I’d crave more social interaction.

Regardless, I’ve downloaded Trillian and set myself up. Currently, I’m only configured with my MSN account. Should I bother with any of the other IM flavours–AIM, Yahoo, IRC, ICQ? I’m familiar with all of them, but have little sense of which is most popular. What do the Apple snobs users employ?

On MSN, I’m darrenbarefoot@hotmail.com (spam all you want, mofos, I never used that badboy). If you’re a friend, family or articulate stranger, feel free to add me and we’ll, you know, socialize.

Comments: 10 Responses so far

Richard
June 21st, 2004
11:23 pm

My IM clients are roughly equivalent to the geographical location of the contacts. By far most of my MSN contacts are from Vancouver and friends or family only (as opposed to co-workers). Same with ICQ, although there is one colleague or two there. Y! seems to be the most work and/or geographically far in terms of contacts, and AIM is almost exclusively friends and far away.

The point, which is really a question: does it seem like MSN is the preferred IM client or–in this age of Trillian and Miranda, the open source client I use–flavour of Vancouver?

[Reply]

John Keyes
June 22nd, 2004
1:01 am

I use Fire (http://fire.sourceforge.net/) on OS X.

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no name yet
June 22nd, 2004
2:46 am

I use Proteus on OS X. It’s a fantastic barebones GUI multi-IM client (like Fire, but it works). On my other machines I use GAIM.

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timsamoff
June 22nd, 2004
6:09 am

Fire does rock indeed — it supports every major IM variant at once.

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Boris Mann
June 22nd, 2004
8:15 am

I use Adium X on the Mac, which also supports all protocols.

This out of necessity — I started with ICQ back when it was the first network, and added others in order to communicate with people that weren’t on the same network.

And “Apple snobs” use iChat, which interoperates with AOL’s IM network.

[Reply]

Boris Mann
June 22nd, 2004
8:19 am

And what the heck: here is a poll on which IM networks people use.

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heather
June 22nd, 2004
8:20 am

i’m always on icq, but thanks to trillian, i also occasionally cycle through aim and yahoo. i stopped logging into msn when i started getting IM spam from them.

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Richard
June 22nd, 2004
10:13 am

I haven’t gotten any spam from MSN anymore because only the people on my contact list are allowed to send me messages.

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morph
June 22nd, 2004
12:38 pm

I use Proteus or CenterICQ on the Mac. (CenterICQ is very linuxish and is text based). iChat uses AIM so you might have to get an AIM / ICQ account (apparently they are now a unified namespace) to talk to iChat users.

[Reply]

Martin-Éric
June 27th, 2004
4:16 pm

I try to avoid all the commercial IMs and instead strive for a real standard: Jabber. I discussed the matter in a recent entry on my blog.

[Reply]

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