While I’m on the subject of chat, I figured I could talk about Pidgin. Pidgin is a multiprotocol IM (Instant Messenger) client. It can handle quite the long list of chat protocols: AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, MySpaceIM, QQ, SILC , SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo!, Zephyr. A number of these I’ve never heard of. I don’t use it for IRC (see last post,) but I do use it for AIM, GTalk, MSN, ICQ and Yahoo messenger (yes, I have accounts using all of those protocols. Should I hunt up Zephyr?)
Pidgin is available for Windows or Linux. It used to be called GAIM. The engine underneath Pidgin is called libpurple – which is also underneath the FOSS IRC Client Adium, for Mac OS X. (Adium is what I used when I was on a Mac desktop.)
Pidgin is great software. It’s the best FOSS IM client I’ve used so far (and I’ve used quite a few.) It’s got great plug-ins, too.
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