What if you’re at school, at work or using a public computer and there’s no instant messaging client installed? You could try downloading it but chances are that you’ll bump into quite some ‘guest restrictions’. In the past I solved this by installing the files into the My Documents folder, or right on the desktop, but that’s so unprofessional.
So what else can you do? You could use an online IM client, like imo, eBuddy or meebo. By using one of these three websites, you can chat with your buddies without installing a single thing.
Over the past couple of months, I have gone from being a passive uninterested Twitter user to an addicted engaged Twitter user. Why the sudden change? Partly because I have seen how the product has evolved for the better and also partly because the number of tools, features and users for Twitter has grown exponentially. All the major news networks and blogs also maintain Twitter feeds.
Here’s a prime example of how Twitter has grown into something useful. Before writing this article, I sent a Twitter message saying that I was writing this and I asked people for opinions and input. In a matter of minutes, I was flooded with private direct messages with website links, ideas, tips and much more to consider for this piece.
I am going through an big instant messaging phase at the moment, partly due to my growing addiction with Twitter. I’ve been getting all my Twitter updates sent to my Google Talk desktop app and this has got me increasingly interested in what other types of information I can get sent to my desktop IM client.
So I went looking for a free web-based tool, preferably a chat bot, that would send pre-selected RSS feeds to an IM program. After trying several that didn’t work as advertised (I won’t name any names), I finally ended up using ZapTXT - although the set-up didn’t exactly go too smoothly at first.
It’s been a long time, and there’s been no new features added to one of favorite, and modest instant messengers, Google Talk. If you can’t wait for the Google Talk team to update their product and need more features desperately, there are a number of third party GTalk add-ons you can use. Here are a few of them:
At the time of writing, there’s nothing like ‘invisible mode’ on Gtalk that can keep the annoyers at bay. But most people desperately need it. Here’s where gAlwaysIdle comes in.
Download it , install it and from then on you can control your Google Talk idle status.
I live in Gmail. In fact my entire life gets run by Gmail in every possible conceivable way (except for cooking my dinner which is the next Gmail feature that I am waiting for!). I am now running a little experiment to see how much information I can collate from inside Gmail without having to visit other sites. With a staggering 5GB of Gmail space, I think there’s no danger anytime soon of running out of space!
