These days virtually everyone is in touch with Cloud Computing. In fact, most of us are relying on it to some degree. The internet, metaphorically referred to as “the cloud”, produces ever more Web 2.0 applications that enable us to take our lives online. We don’t write diaries - we blog. We don’t call to share news - we twitter. We meet friends through social networks, and our busy calendars are readily available online.
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.
Yoono is a Firefox extension that works like a sidebar and lets you stay updated with friends and websites. You can stay connected with friends on social network websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Piczo, Flickr and Friendfeed. You can also talk to your friends using AIM, MSN and Yahoo Messenger using the widget. Yoono is a great extension if you want to save time switching between all the social network websites you use and keep less messenger programs running because of the built in instant messenger support. In a way Yoono is like Flock in the way that it keeps you connected with your social networks such as Flickr but I think Flock does a better job at it.
If you’re always checking your RSS feeds for news, stories and other kinds of updates, here’s a really neat tool that may be your new best friend. IM Feeds is a service that takes your pre-existing list of RSS feeds and runs them through an instant messenger (IM) robot which will notify you as soon as a new article is posted. The simplicity of the service is one of its greatest attributes.
I gave a review of Digsby on Make Use Of a couple of weeks ago and concluded that although you can expect it to still be a little rough around the edges; it just may be the most promising multi-messaging client we have seen.
In your comments a few were from people who had tried Digsby a while ago and found it too buggy to be a serious alternative to their current chat client. Despite being less then a year old, it came third in our poll about favorite Instant Messaging client. I can now confidently say that after the number of recent updates, Digsby is at a point where I can now confidently say it should be perfectly safe to download and try. Errors, CPU spikes and especially RAM usage have been considerably optimized over the last few weeks.
It’s time for another MUO Poll. Every poll we had so far was a smashing success. You guys did a great job. Thanks to you, we had a clear winner in every case.
This time we want to ask you about instant messaging programs. What is your IM client of choice ? Do you use a multi-protocol client that supports multiple accounts (i.e Pidgin) or prefer to stick with a single-network chat client like MSN, Gtalk, Yahoo Messenger etc. Let us know below. You can select up to 2 clients.
As a pretty big fan of PC gaming, I have always wanted a better way to find my friends online and jump into a server with them. Well, XFire provides that solution and so much more.
You can grab XFire here and quickly install it. Once installed, XFire will automatically detect all of the games on your computer and prompt you to enter any of your friends’ emails, names or XFire names. This makes it extremely easy to get started.
XFire supports a massive amount of games from popular games like Counter-Strike to small time wasters like Zuma Deluxe. If you want to look at the exhaustive list, you can find it here.
Here at Make Use Of, we like to give you choices. Explorer add-ons? Here’s seven. Want your blog to get noticed? Here are six ways . Online desktop? Try eight ways.
If you want instant message aggregation, there are a number of applications. You could try Trillian, Pidgin or any number of other lightweight multi-messaging applications. Or you could check out Digsby and for me there is no choice.
I have been using Digsby since it was in early beta, and it has rapidly became a favourite of mine. Digsby is a messaging application that integrates instant messaging with easy access to your email and social networks:
If you are a user of Mac OS X you’ll probably know that the MSN application that Microsoft has developed for OS X isn’t really that amazing. For starters you can’t have a video chat with a friend or talk via a microphone using MSN on OS X. Also the interface for the application doesn’t look all that amazing.
So I have decided to make a list of five alternative chat MSN applications out there for Mac OS X that have better functionality and allow you to customize the look and feel of the application.
(1) Adium
If you’re a social network magician, you’ll know that a big part of these sites is “updating your status”. This can be something profound such as “discovered the meaning of life - 42!” to the more tedious “hey! Just discovered something big and green up my nose!“. But like it or hate it, status messages have become a big part of social networks and now Ping.fm has come along to make updating them a lot easier for you.
Instant Messaging has become an indispensable online tool these days, and messenger applications have therefore become popular in connecting with people. With the wide variety of programs coming out in this arena, the experience only gets better. Here are some add-ons to add additional features to your favorite chat program.
Not add-ons, really, but these multi-protocol IMs help a lot in connecting to people from various networks - you need not necessarily have to install every other Instant Messaging software around. Give them a go!
Want to have identical browser settings on every one of your PCs ? How about keeping documents on your office and home PCs synchronized? For these and several other ways to sync your data read further. Enjoy!
1. Google Browser Sync - Sync Browser Bookmarks, History, Settings, etc. between diff. PCs
Google Browser Sync is a Firefox extension from Google that can auto synchronize your browser bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across multiple computers. It even lets you restore open browser tabs and windows across different machines so you can always pickup from where you left. It’s completely automated, all you need to do is to install it on all computers that you use on a regular basis.
2. SyncToy - Synchronize Files Between PC and USB Thumbdrive
I widely advertise my instant messaging ID’s as I want potential clients to be able to find me easily. But the problem with doing that is that I end up with a lot of spam messages every day.
Never a day goes by without automated robots sending me instant messages inviting me to talk dirty with them or to go to a certain website to stock up on my Viagra tablets. Now normally I would just block them but this only really works for one or two messages a day.
There are two groups of people in the world - those who know when to walk away from their computer and those who are tied to it 24/7. The former group will therefore hate this hack - and will wail about it in the comments. The latter group will love it. Unfortunately, I am in the latter group!
There is a plug-in available for Pidgin called gSMS which will notify you by mobile phone SMS when someone tries to contact you by Pidgin and you don’t respond within a specified time frame. This would be useful if you had to step away from your desk but you were expecting an important message. By configuring this plug-in, you can be told by SMS that the person left a message and you can get back in touch with them as soon as possible.
Being self-employed, I rely on the internet to bring clients to me. When they do find me, I want to make it as easy as possible for them to contact me. One way to do that is to insert hyperlinks to my chat ID’s.
A hyperlink is just a link that a person can click on that will instantly open the correct chat window with the person’s chat ID already in place.
The benefits - less clicking for the other person, less emails asking for my chat ID. They can just click on the relevant chat link and begin typing an instant message to me.
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.
Pidgin (formerly GAIM) is a good multi protocol instant messaging client. I won’t say it’s the best out there, but it’s still good and worth using. If you frequently hang out on multiple instant messengers, dispose them all and start using Pidgin. Here are some tips for those who’re using Pidgin already and those who’ve just downloaded it:
Plugins
Ah! Most Open Source applications allow you to install plugins to add additional features, and Pidgin is no exception. It comes with a set of plugins that are deactivated by default. You can go to Tools >> Plugins to configure them.
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 have made a new friend - well actually I am becoming reacquainted with an old friend. Have you heard of Smarterchild? Smarterchild is an AimBot, an automated assistant that can be added to your instant messenger contacts. It can help you remember things, lookup headlines, find out about local movies, and so on. Now that AIM has been integrated into Gmail this might be a great combination for making SmarterChild into your virtual Personal Assistant.
Poor Yahoo. Once the unassailable giant of the internet that could do no wrong, it has been constantly overshadowed by the big kid on the block (you know who it is, starts with a G, ends in an E…..). Once I thought Yahoo Mail and I would live together for ever and produce lots of healthy email but then Gmail stole my heart away…..
But all is not lost for Yahoo. People love to put them down but I still love them and they are still a mighty force to be reckoned with. Here’s why:
(1) Del.icio.us
I am a total Skype fanatic, to the point where I use it for 95% of my phone calls and virtually all of my Instant Messaging chats. But when you download Skype for the first time, you are given a basic shell of a program and then you have to make the effort to personalise your Skype and add the programs which will be useful to you.
So today, let’s take a look at my Skype and two of the features I have found useful.
Today we digg into All-In-One Messengers (aka multi-protocol Instant Messaging clients), these handy apps merge several messenger platforms (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber…) into one messenger.
We got it all covered: web-based ones (to access from work or school), desktop downloadables and for mobile devices.
Meebo (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, GoogleTalk, ICQ, Jabber) - Lets you access multiple IM accounts simultaneously. Registration isn’t required, however if you sign-up (free) you will be able to:
Meebo is a web service that allows users to access several IM (instant messaging) programs from a single webpage. You can think of it as an online messenger program which can simultaneously connect to:
Meebo has nicely designed and user friendly interface which makes it look very similar to other desktop messengers. As long as you are on broadband you should not feel any speed difference between Meebo and other desktop messengers like Yahoo messenger or MSN. I have tested it out on 128 kbs (which is very low) broadband connection and did not expereince any lag. I did not try it on dial up but can tell you for sure that it is not a good idea.
