Instant Messaging
Instant Messaging is a popular comunications mechanism. There are many IM clients available that allow you to take advantage of this technology, and most are free. One thing that might influence your decision as to which client to go for is which one most of your friends and family use! Otherwise, you can try them all and see which suits your needs the best.
Some popular standard clients:
- AOL Instant Messenger
- AIM is a popular IM client from AOL.
- MSN Messenger
- MSN Messenger is by Microsoft.
- Yahoo! Messenger
- Yahoo! Messenger offers a variety of features tailored towards users of their many services.
- ICQ (I Seek You)
- The ICQ community has been around for a long time, and it offers many unique features.
Multi-Protocol Clients
These IM clients allow you to connect to all of the above networks (and more) at the same time! There are certain drawbacks, however, to using a multi-protocol IM client. First, not all of the features of any particular client will be available. For example, not many multi-protocol clients have webcam support. Sometimes you may experience difficulty with file transfers (or possibly other features) if you are exchanging a file with someone who is using a different client.
- GAIM
- GAIM is a nice open source (free), multi-protocol IM client. New features are added rather often.
- Trillian
- Trillian comes in two flavors: The Free version and the Pro version. The Pro version allows the use of some neat plugins, and has webcam and voice chat support. If you just need to use it for text chatting, the free version should be fine.
