I am not a huge user of Facebook these days but nevertheless I have been taking a look at their newly introduced Facebook Chat because Facebook is the only medium in which I can keep in touch with a couple of long distance friends. But since I don’t like the actual Facebook website that much anymore, I was intrigued to find a Pidgin chat plugin which allows you to integrate Facebook Chat directly into the Pidgin Instant Messenger interface - and for me it works more or less smoothly so far.

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.

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.