Do you use Instant Messenger?
Do you use an instant messenger like AIM or MSN or GoogleTalk?
Do you have a program to link all of your instant messengers together so you can just run one software program and talk on all of the different messengers?
I’ve been using Trillian to do this for years. Basically Trillian allows me to insert my AIM username and password, Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk (Jabber), and even ICQ. They read all my different users from the different address books and allow me to use one software to run my Instant Messengers. I thought Trillian was pretty cool. They had features like “skins” which allowed me to change the look and feel of my instant messengers. They had some pretty neat icons and things incorporated into the software. All in all it was pretty good stuff.
EXCEPT a couple of problems.
1. Trillian takes forever to load! The software is now bloated with so much crap that I don’t need that it takes forever for the software to load. On my laptop this means when I’m in a hurry to turn on my laptop and do something trillian’s loading slows down the laptop for a good 30 seconds before I can do anything. When I’m in a hurry I hate to turn on my computer because Trillian is going to take forever.
2. Trillian seems to loose some AIM connections without properly notifying me. I’d be chatting with my wife and she would be IMing me but I wouldn’t get the messages and she wouldn’t get a warning saying I wasn’t logged in. So she’s basically mistaking the fact that I got the message when I didn’t. You can imagine this sometimes caused grief in our family.
SO…
What do you do?
Well I had been hearing about Meebo for awhile. Basically they do the same thing as Trillian except instead of requiring you to download software, you do all your IM from a web page! No extra software to download. So now I can turn off trillian and save the 30 seconds of extra load time when I boot up my laptop! I’m stoked!
So far I’ve been using Meebo for two days but I’ve been pleased so far. I also haven’t had any problems with the lost AIM connections, however 2 days isn’t a lot of testing. I’ll write more in the next few days as I have a chance to use Meebo more.
Try out Meebo today. (I don’t get paid for referring it, I just think it’s cool.)
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Hi, Ben, thanks for the tip. I used Trillian for years, then got tired of IM’s interrupting my “real” work online, so I stopped using IM altgether. Now, I am interesting in revisiting it. I had started using Trillian again a couple weeks ago, and this may be a good way to clean up my hard drive, which is already imploding due to downloads, etc… so, I’ll take a spin. Thanks. Any tips on how to get the most out of im communication would be a welcome topic here. Mary
Hi ben..I am not really a big fan of using IM and I haven’t tried using Trillian nor Meebo either but I will take your advice to use Meebo rather than Trillian..