How can a great service be unheard of? Even though there have been a few mentions about the service on MakeUseOf here and here, the developer has kept a low profile and quietly put the project below the radar for the past two years. After three years in alpha stage, this solid app has finally shown itself (with a new look) to the public.

Currently, imo.im is available as a web-based chat client (using flash), an iOS app, and an Android app.

Connect To Multi-Network

When you visit imo.im for the first time, you’ll notice how clean the interface is: a lot of white space and the login window in the middle. If the look reminds you of Google, it’s because one of the co-founders is also one of Google’s first ten employees – Georges Harik.

To start using imo.im, just log in with one of your IM accounts. You can add (and link) more accounts to imo.im later.

After logging in, you’ll see another vast white space with small columns of menus on the left and right of the page. Use “Add Account” from the “Accounts” menu on the left to link your other IM accounts. Basic information about an account will pop out if you hover your mouse over that account.

You can quickly change your status by using the drop down menu at the top of the page.

You can also add/change your profile photo by clicking on the profile box above the “Accounts” menu.

On the right side of the screen, there’s the “Buddies” menu. Similar to the “Account” menu, you can view more information about one of your buddies by hovering your mouse above his/her profile box.

Your buddies are automatically grouped based on groups that you have on your IM accounts. But you can easily create a new group by clicking on the “Create a new group” button. Adding a new buddy is also that simple.

You can move your buddies between groups by dragging and dropping them.

Any friend request from one of your IM accounts will pop out on imo.im, and you can choose to Deny, Block, or Add the person.

Clicking on any of your friends in the list will open up an individual chat window, which – if you are really fussy – could quickly fill up the entire screen. You can make your screen tidier by choosing the tab view from the button on the left of the “Buddies” menu.

Notifications pop up in a small yellow window inside the imo.im environment.

You can choose to enable desktop notifications if your browser supports the feature.

To Go Beyond The Text

The ability to easily connect to multiple chat platforms is not the only thing that imo.im has to offer. The small microphone icon in the text field of a chat window tells us that imo.im also support voice messages. This feature allows users to send up to 30 second voice messages to their chat partners.

To enable this feature, you have to give permission to imo.im to access your computer’s camera and microphone.

Then to send a voice message, all you have to do is hold the green “Hold to talk” button while you speak with the microphone. The voice messages will automatically be sent every time you release the green button.

Sending voice messages might mean nothing if you use the browser-based chat client from your computer. But if you use the phone version, the feature means free calls. You can use your phone as a long distance walkie-talkie (sort of) over an Internet connection and do voice chat with your friends without the phone charges.

On a good and stable Internet connection, you can also call your buddies and have continuous audio and/or video chat between computers and phones.

If you have a file or two to share with your chat buddy, click on the “Send File” tab, choose the file, and click the “Send file” button. You can only send one file at a time, though.

The Footnotes

There are some things that you might not notice at the bottom of the imo.im screen. The first one is the “Sessions” link. Clicking on it will open the “Active Sessions” window with information on devices that you currently use to open imo.im.

The next one is the “Preferences“. You can enable desktop notifications from here (if your browser supports it). You can also prevent individuals who are not in your buddy list from contacting you.

In my opinion, imo.im is a great chat service. Maybe the greatest advantage that this service has over its competitors is its seamless integration between the web, iOS, and Android clients. Along with its support for multiple chat networks, and the combination of all the features, imo.im might be the instant messenger of your dreams.

What do you think of imo.im? Share your thoughts and opinions using the comments below.

As well as the usual IM protocols (MSN, GTalk, AIM etc…) Digsby now supports a plethora of social networking platforms. Users are now able to monitor Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace via dedicated panels and add accounts via the reworked Accounts section of Digsby’s preferences.

External services like Facebook and Gmail now have better integration, meaning you no longer need to add a Facebook news feed and Facebook Chat separately, and the same for Gmail and GTalk.

The team have also added email functionality, so checking POP3 and IMAP accounts is only a click away.

Updates to the application will be handled in future using a new auto-updater, which downloads updates once you have logged in and applies them when Digsby is restarted. The team designed the new update system much like Google’s Chrome updater so that “downloading updates never gets in your way”.

As you’d expect from any regular update there are also numerous fixes and the promise of a more stable client, with less memory leaks and disconnections.

Other features added include more intuitive sorting of buddy lists, an ICQ spam blocker which blocks all incoming friend requests with URLs in them and right-to-left (RTL) text support in case you happen to type that way.

Digsby provides an instant messaging solution for Windows users, with Mac and Linux versions coming soon. You can download the latest build right here. Let us know what you think about it.

Now, of course, you can easily side-step this problem by using multi-platform IM clients capable of logging into multiple services at once. Adium is widely regarded as the best IM for Mac computers, but it now has competition in the form of Trillian, which has hopped the waters between Windows and OS X.

Platform Support Showdown

If you’re downloading a multi-platform IM client, platform support is obviously important to you. You’re downloading the client so you won’t have to open a lot of different instant messengers at once, after all!

Trillian for Mac supports AIM, Bonjour, FaceBook, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MySpaceIM, schuelerVZ, Twitter, VZ, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger.

That’s a fairly comprehensive list. It isn’t as comprehensive as Adium, but it’s near-as-make-no-difference. There are also some trade-offs. For example, Adium supports LiveJournal, but Trillian supports Twitter.

There is just one thing missing that I’d really like to see ““ Skype. I’m not sure why it isn’t included, because Skype is supported in Trillian for Windows. Adium also doesn’t support Skype, however.

User Interface

If there’s any single element most likely to trip up a Windows developer that makes the leap to a Mac it is the user interface. OS X has very different interface elements that Windows and OS X users expect the programs that they download to integrate into the operating system more smoothly.

Trillian does a pretty good job of making an interface that looks at home on a Mac. There is only one real button on the main IM window, and it is located at the very bottom beside a search bar. Large icons and text indicate contacts, and you can read about a contact’s status by hovering over them with your cursor.

Adium sets the bar high, however, and Trillian doesn’t quite match up to the example it sets. Trillian looks nice, but Adium looks as if it could be a program installed on our Mac from the factory.

Customization

Adium is well known for its customization features. Although the default settings look brilliant, Adium does not take the typical Mac approach of offering only a handful of carefully selected options. You can change all sort of things including contact icons, the color of interface elements and even the shape of the IM window itself.  A robust community that offers various add-ons and new themes supports these customization features.

Trillian, well ““ it doesn’t really have any of this. What you see is what you get. Trillian does offer Growl support, just like Adium, but there are no serious customization options for the interface. You can change the font size of contacts and alter the way notifications appear, but that’s about it.

Conclusion

Is Trillian an alternative for Adium? Sure, I suppose it is. It does most of the same things and it is fully functional as an IM client. You’ll have no problem at all using it day-to-day, and chances are good that whatever IM program(s) you use are supported (except Skype, dagnabit).

With that said, I don’t see any reason why someone using Adium would switch to Trillian, and I don’t see any reason why someone needing a general multi-platform IM client should download Trillian instead of Adium. I’m sure that the folks developing Trillian will continue to plug away at their new Mac version and add new features over time, but for now Adium remains the heavyweight champion of the Mac instant messengers.

PingChat! now offers a completely free cross-platform mobile chat program that supports iPhone, Blackberry and Android handsets. The app is downloadable directly from their website, which means that Blackberry users who don’t have access to the Blackberry App World can still download and use PingChat!

Once you’ve downloaded PingChat! to your phone you will be required to register the app. All that means is you will be asked to enter a unique username, which is linked to your phone number.

In order to chat with your friends using PingChat!, you have to have their username. They do make it easy to get the word out there, giving you a quick and easy way to broadcast your username on Facebook, Twitter or via email. As you start to add contacts and receive messages, you can easily link your PingChat! contacts to your address book.

Once you’re all set up, you can start sending and receiving messages. But you’re not just limited to text. You can send picture messages, by taking a photo while the app is open or by choosing a photo saved on your phone. You can record a voice note up to 30 seconds long. Using PingChat!, you can also send videos saved or recorded on your phone to your friends. iPhone 3G users can send videos that have been recorded with other third party apps that have been saved to the camera roll. Blackberry, Android and iPhone 3GS/4 users can send videos recorded with their native video camera apps. You can also send the contact details of anyone in your address book.

And it doesn’t end there. You can send your exact location using Google Maps, a feature that would be of huge help if you’re lost or your car has broken down and need someone to pick you up. Your location will be uploaded to PingChat! as a map.

And of course, PingChat! uses push notifications to let you know when you have a new message. You can choose to toggle the sound and vibration for notifications on and off from directly within the app’s settings on the iPhone. And if you change your number or phone, you can unregister the account, and re-register with so that you don’t have to change your username.

The Blackberry settings are limited to unregistering your account and choosing which sound profile to use with the app. iPhone users will be happy to know that their version supports landscape mode. The app works over 3G, EDGE and WiFi so you can keep in touch with your friends no matter where you are.

Have you used PingChat? Let us know what you think of it in the comments.

Therefore, it becomes really important for a user to be up and about and have his preferred chat clients handy. However, since a user may be active on multiple messaging networks, sometimes it gets really, really tough to juggle Skype, Google Talk, MSN, and the many others available as each may require a user to download and install their individual clients.

This is where IMO.im steps in. If you are a Google Chrome user, you can use IMO.im to seamlessly stay connected to all your chat networks at once. No more unnecessary installation of software required. No more irritating configuration dialog boxes, and more importantly peace of mind for the user.

Setting Up

The first thing you will need to do is get hold of Google Chrome. Do that by clicking this link. Next, head over to the Chrome Extensions Gallery and install the IMO.im Google Chrome Extension.

Once installed, you will see the following icon next to the address bar (or omnibar) in Chrome.

Click on the icon shown to continue setting up your networks. You will be greeted with the screen below. Click either of the two links in the text to head over to the imo.im website.

What occurs next is the beauty of using IMO.im. At the IMO.im website, you are not required to go through any complex signup procedures in order to get yourself up and running. What you can do instead, is use your existing login credentials for various networks to sign in. Click one of the many networks supported and login using your credentials for that network.

You will then be taken to a dashboard, from where you can setup additional networks so that you can use all of them simultaneously. This you can do under the Accounts panel on the left hand side of the screen. Once you have additional accounts configured, you have the option of linking them together so that you can sign in using any of your configured accounts and get access to all of your accounts.

The right hand side displays your unified buddy list. Use this to get chatting with all your friends. However, thanks to the Chrome extension you just installed, you will find that you rarely ever have to use this page again apart for account configuration.

Usage

Now comes the easy part. Whenever you need to chat with a buddy, all you have to do is click on that icon we showed you above. This will bring up the screen below, which will allow you to change your status as well as chat with all your friends, without ever having to leave the page you are browsing currently.

To chat with someone, simply enter their name in the search box and if they are online, select their name to start chatting. Whenever you click on your current page, the box will disappear, and remind you of a new message using a very short, unobtrusive sound, as well as a notification window at the bottom right of the screen (which you can get to by clicking the same button as before). In case you are busy with multiple buddies, each of them will show up in their own tabs in this same window. Below you can see me chatting with a friend using IMO.im

Advanced Settings

There are a few settings that you can change using the IMO.im Preferences link found at the top of your dashboard when you first sign in. This includes settings for saving a chat history, disabling emoticons, selecting one of thirteen color schemes, etc.

Before I started using IMO.im, my life was a mess of installing numerous chat clients, or finding one universal client that (such as this and these) would let me access all my contacts easily. However, with the goodness of Google Chrome and this extension, I can now spend more time doing what I want to do as well as stay in touch with my friends.

The best part of this is that the whole process is very unobtrusive. One click outside the chat window and the window fades out. One click on the extension icon again and I have all my chats ready to go (and they remain consistent across all Chrome tabs, so there’s no back-and-forth switching of tabs). All this without the need of any additional software. Let us know about your IMO.im experience below.

One of the less pleasant discoveries upon migrating to Mac OS X is that Microsoft’s Messenger client (for Mac) is as bad as they come. Or, as others might put it, complete crap.

Of course, there are alternative IM applications for our beloved Mac. I’m thinking about aMSN, an expendable but oftentimes messy MSN clone; Trillian, multi-protocol minimalism; and, most famously, Adium.

The latter is the leading Mac IM client, with great expandability, looks, and support for most popular protocols. The downside of this multi-protocolism is the lack of support for some MSN features that are now deemed essential, most notably the ability to use custom emoticons.

Below is an Adium fix, so you can hang out with the cool guys once again.

1. Receiving Custom Emoticons

Later versions of Adium already allow you to receive and display custom emoticons while talking with MSN correspondents. However, a bug has kept some Adium installs from putting this, otherwise default, feature to use.

Double-checking doesn’t hurt. Open Adium -> Preferences… -> Advanced -> MSN and make sure the checkbox next to ‘Display custom emoticons‘ is ticked. If you can’t find this setting, and you’re using at least Adium v.1.4, you needn’t worry about this bug; it’s already taken care of in some later releases.

2. Sending Custom Emoticons (Unofficial Fix)

Sending custom emoticons is not a default feature (yet), but Fabio Gallonetto made his own alterations to Adium’s (open) source code. Read more about it on his blog. The essence of the matter is that after appending said changes and recompiling the application, the preferences pane shows an option to add custom smileys with nothing more than a shortcut and the path to an image file.

Once we’re done, you’ll be able to find this option under Adium -> Preferences… -> Appearance by clicking on the Customize… button next to your default emoticon pack.

Adium can sometimes be stubborn about the shortcut you’re trying to specify. To avoid this, click outside of the text field to deselect it, before pressing Close.

2.a – Download An Already Fixed Adium v.1.4 (Beta)

Compiling an application (i.e. creating an executable file from the source code), although considered rudimentary among programmers, can be quite daunting for us regular folks. In consideration, Fabio Gallonetto (the developer of this fix) put online a precompiled copy of the fixed Adium.

This file uses Adium version 1.4 (beta), so know that even though it performs admirably at the moment, at some point in time it’s going to be outdated. But, for now, it’s everything you could wish for.

Download fixed Adium-1.4 [alternative link]

This ZIP file contains the (fixed) Adium application. Head over to your Applications folder, put your current Adium installation somewhere safe, and replace it with the unpacked file you just downloaded. This Adium replacement should retain all your current preferences!

2.b – Fix & Compile A Different Version Of Adium Yourself

You might be enticed to fix and compile a different version of the Adium source code. Before you do, note these concerns. Appending this fix, and recompiling Adium is only advised for advanced computer users; (amateur) developers that know their way around applications like Xcode. Xcode alone is a 2GB download, and although a relatively user-friendly application, still a mighty impressive suite.

Rather than a how-to guide, this part is for reference. To build Adium, you’ll need Xcode, which can be obtained here after registering for the free Apple Developer program. Where to get the source-code is specified on the Adium Wiki. The patch can be downloaded from here (as a diff file).

Do you have anything to add to this subject? Perhaps you feel like Mac users are missing out on a wholly different IM client that doesn’t even require a fix. We’d love to hear from you in the comments section below!

The Meebo instant messenger was one of the 5 online instant messaging services that David covered last year here on MUO. The platform has since become widely popular and proven to be very useful for communicating with your contacts across the various networks and platforms with which you have an account.

In this article, I will cover 8 reasons why the Meebo instant messenger is an attractive instant messaging choice.

1. No Software To Install

The first impressive thing about Meebo is that you don’t have to install any software to use it. You just go to Meebo.com, sign on, and you can instantly message your friends/contacts right from the browser window.

If you create a Meebo account, you can sign into all of your IM accounts at once and chat in a single integrated buddylist. This also means that you can sign onto your Meebo instant messenger from any computer and have all of your settings intact.

2. Message Friends On All Of Your Networks

When we first covered Meebo back in 2006, it only had support for the major messengers like AIM and MSN. Now, Meebo has support for all the major networks, including AIM, Yahoo!, Windows Live, Google Talk, ICQ, and Jabber. It also has support for social networking platforms like Facebook, Myspace, and MyYearbook.

3. Get All The Features You Want

Meebo has a lot of the cool features that you would find with a standalone program like AIM. It allows you to set custom backgrounds and buddy icons, transfer files with people, and save your conversation history if needed. You can also launch applications like games and video chat.

4. The Meebo Notifier

If you don’t want to keep a browser window open the entire time you’re on Meebo, just check out the Meebo Notifier. The Meebo Notifier is a tray icon that allows you to stay signed into Meebo even when your browser is closed. It allows for automatic sign-on and it provides notifications when you receive a message or a buddy signs on or off.

You can even set up email notifications with the Meebo Notifier. If you receive an email on your Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, or AIM accounts, it will notify you of your new message.

5. Take Meebo With You On Your Phone

You can access your Meebo account on your phone or mobile device. There are apps for both the iPhone and Android, but you can sign on from any wireless device by simply going to the website.

6. Create A Chat Room

With Meebo Rooms, you can join a chat room that interests you or create one of your own. You can make your rooms public or private, customize them, and enjoy your powers as a room moderator. You can join rooms based on your interests (e.g. movies).

7. Get The Firefox Extension

Use Firefox? You can install Meebo’s Firefox extension to get Meebo as a sidebar on your browser. From the sidebar you can access a smart buddylist and receive visual notifications when your friends message you. You can also share links and images by dragging them to your buddies while surfing the web.

8. Access the Meebo Instant Messenger On Restricted Computers

If you are on a computer that restricts instant messaging access, you can install Meebo Repeater. Meebo Repeater allows you to access Meebo on a restricted computer without using a third-party proxy. Just install the repeater on a computer that can access the web freely and it will bounce the signal so you can access Meebo securely.

So there are the 8 reasons to use Meebo Instant Messenger that I came up with. Take your communications online and keep track of all of your contacts from the cloud.

What do you think of Meebo? Do you use another online IM service? Leave your thoughts, ideas, and comments below.