Re: LUG: What are your favorite IM clients? - Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:37:57 -0400

Subject : Re: LUG: What are your favorite IM clients?

From : Alexander Ray <alexjray.ncsu@gmail.[redacted]>

Date : Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:37:57 -0400

> ajray, why do you think Google Wave will be a success at instant messaging?
> It doesn't fall neatly into the IM category. Will everything move towards
> the Wave model, or will it simply become another way we talk to people in
> addition to all the communication channels we already have?

1: live character streams. I've wanted that for a long time, and that
ALONE is worth my pick.
2: Open API/Developer base- combined w/ the projects goals allows me
to consolidate my (often overwhelming) sources of communication. Less
of why it's a good chat client and more about why its an overall solid
pick for information client.

More, i'll have to get to that if I ever get in. Maybe akdom and
nilbus can chime in w/ their thoughts?

> Has anyone tried Empathy? I've installed it but don't do enough instant
> messaging to see the differences from Pidgin.

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2007/09/gnome-2-22-planning-empathy-messaging-client-and-toolkit-proposed-for-inclusion.ars

That (found at the end of the wikipedia page on it) appears to be some
good press about it. Looks like it was included in the Ubuntu
release... 7.10

It's been about two years since then and now Pidgin is included in the
default setup for both Fedora (latest: 11) and Ubuntu (latest: 9.04),
and as far as I know there's been no move to change that. It looks
like the GNOME (at least the aforementioned distros) community has
pretty much adopted Pidgin as their chat client.