Most people would associate an Instant Messaging (IM) program with chatting idly to friends all day long but in actual fact a lot of companies have been developing chat bots which enable you to use your IM program to make you more productive. The best one (in my opinion) is Imified. I use it on a daily basis and I can’t say enough good things about it. I’d like to show you today some of the things it can do to help you.
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 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
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!
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.
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