Instant Messenger organizer??

I heard of a program that puts MSN, AIM, Yahoo mess., and other messaging programs into one program so that you can talk to people that have different services without having to open more than one program yourself.

Could someone tell me what the name of this program is, and also how well it works.


THanks again for the help!

 

trillian

.....

 

Trillian.

It's okay, I never got the hang of it really, but I dont really use anything other than AIM, so I was fine with sticking with the normal AIM list.

 

I personally use gaim ( http://gaim.sf.net ). It's a little trickier, and doesn't have all the features of the individual IM programs, but I hate that crap anyway

 

well, i only use AIM and MSN....would it be worth it???

 

I will say no because like Pitabred said some features will be missing. If you use more then 4, like me, I used AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo all the same time, I will say get all-in-one IM program, I dont care about missing features, I just want to chat.

JC

 

Depends on what sort of features you use. Some newer MSN features are a bit shaky (video chat and such. I think it's supported in Trillian, but never bothered to find out)

For the other protocols, I believe Trillian and Gaim supports pretty much all features.

I love Trillian and Gaim. So much more convenient than having to run two (or five) separate programs.

I'd say give it a try, see how it works out. If you don't like it, uninstall and go back to the old individual clients.

Just for the record, Trillian is a commercial product (although there is a free trial version of it), and it's generally very polished, looks nice, well designed and such.
Gaim is open source, 100% free and... well, it works great.

 

Trillian free version absolutely rules. In fact I liked it so much I after 1 year I ended up buying a copy so that I can use the webcam features.

 

Miranda IM
http://www.miranda-im.org

Can be very nice & powerful, or ugly and simple. Depending on the setup. The problem with miranda is that it is extremely customizable and YOU have to customize it. Anyway, I LOVE it.

 

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this above. The one "problem" with these 3 programs is that occasionally, when one of the chat protocols change, it takes a few days before the programs are patched. Gaim had this problem a few weeks ago, where the MSN plugin would just start crashing because Microsoft made some small change to the protocol. Took 3 days or so for the Gaim developers to find a fix. So the 1-2 times a year something like this happens is not really a problem in my opinion, since it's still fixed within a couple of days, but it's probably worth mentioning, since it might be a bigger issue for you.

 

Gaim is awesome. It's not 'tricky' as another user had said. Its not the perfect IM client, but it's good. I have a plan for the perfect IM client... someday I'll get around to implementing it.

 

I found Gaim awkward to use. I will say the one thing about Trillian that I dislike is how long it takes to load.

 

For what it's worth, I think the main focus of the next version of Trillian is optimization, in memory consumption, general performance, and load time... Should be interesting.

 

Add my vote for Miranda. Will run all the IM protocols you need.. and do it using less resources than any other program.

 

I second that.
The only thing is that it doesn't auto-relog, or at least, I can't find a plugin/option for it.
(my internet connection jitters... turns off for like 2 seconds, and it does that quite often. )
another thing is that it comes with minimal features, which is GOOD, but to a certain extent. It took me forever to enable smilies and text format(bbc)

 

Assuming you are using the latest Unicode version (0.5)-

Look in the Options (make sure show expert is checked).
Under the Network section, for each protocol, there should be an option for "Keep-alives". ICQ has a check box, and AOL has a timer, for example.

And the AIM protocol has a checkbox for "convert incoming msgs to BBCode".

Edit- Ooo!! New version today, Sept 8! 0.5.1

 

Trillian loads slow only if you use all the plugins, just unload the ones u don't need. Rigth now my Trillian uses about 9 mb while my Mirandia uses 11

 

how much virtual mem is Trillian eating?
add the column in task manager.
with icq and aim protocols, miranda rarely use more than 8M /4M virtual.

 

Technically speaking though, that's not possible. All memory is virtual memory, so it can never use less virtual than physical memory.
How Task Manager occasionally manages to show that feat, I don't know. But I do know that Task Manager is only good for giving an approximate figure of memory usage.

In any case, I'd say it doesn't really matter whether a program uses 8 or 16MB memory. If that can make a difference in performance on your system, you need more RAM... Desperately...

But for what it's worth, Miranda is designed pretty much with the goal of being lightweight, at the cost of some more advanced functionality. Trillian is the opposite, except the next version is going on a diet, supposedly. But the current version typically eats a few MB more memory, and offers some features as standard that Miranda either can't do, or need a bunch of plugins to catch up with, which again increases Miranda's memory usage.

 

Gaim <--- Free

 

Trillian or Trillian Pro - I have been using Trillian Pro for over three years it is really easy to use. I have a co-worker who uses Gaim, I find it a little weird. Also you can try PalTalk that will allow you to communicate across different IM types.

 

AIM is free. YIM is free. MSNM is free. Google chat is free. Miranda is Free. Trillian basic is Free. What's your point?

Jalf, I agree. And we're basically splitting hairs at this point.
I know that 8 vs 4 makes no realistic difference on my machine when I have 1.5G of RAM, but I still want those numbers as low as I can get them.