29th June 2001
Everyone has their own favorite Instant Messaging provider; ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, AIM, etc., and I'm tired of running 47 different clients just to keep in touch with everyone, not to mention the horrendous RAM hit that you take with so many individual apps doing virtually the same thing. Invention being the mother of necessity (err... something like that, anyway), several companies address this wasteful behavior with applications that connect to several services. My personal favorite is Trillian. Easy to configure, works reliably and offers support for the big 4 providers. There are configuration options out the wazoo, and the Interface allows you to work with everything in one window, or you can detach the various windows and have little pop-ups all over your desktop, if you prefer it that way. I don't care for that, but Furo seems to enjoy the chaotic environment. Other mutli- provider IM clients available include Odigo, Bantu, Jabber and Imici. Microsoft recently changed their login process to thwart some of these multi-service apps, so be sure to test that out thoroughly to be sure the developers have adjusted to this tactic. For the record, Trillian has released a fix that easily gets around this problem.