Category: IM
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Do the IM protocol wars even matter? Adium and the continued *client* unification of IM…
Continue Reading: Do the IM protocol wars even matter? Adium and the continued *client* unification of IM…Do you care any more about zillion different IM services? Do you care about the IM protocol wars that have plagued the usage of IM for the last years?Odds are that if you are an IM user like me, you probably don’t. Why not? Simple… we’ve unified the IM services on the client side and basically stopped caring about the various services and protocols.
I was reminded of this fact this morning when I received a message saying that an update was available for Adium on my Mac that solved a really annoying disconnection problem with Yahoo!Messenger. (And if you are a Yahoo IM user, you really need to get the 1.3.2b1 beta.)
[NOTE: An equivalent to Adium for Windows or Unix/Linux users is Pidgin.]
Somewhat ironically, there was a discussion going on in a Skype groupchat in which I participate about the various IM protocols and whether anyone really used GTalk, etc. Since I was updating Adium at the time, I took a moment to look at all the different protocols that Adium now supports… as seen in the screenshot on the right side of this post. If I look at my own usage, I use Adium to…
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Joining ooVoo for video… are you an ooVoo user?
Continue Reading: Joining ooVoo for video… are you an ooVoo user?I gave in today and installed ooVoo on my Mac. I’d resisted because I’m a wee bit swamped right now, but with friends talking about “My ooVoo Day” starting on Monday I finally succumbed and installed it. I admit to being a skeptic… but I’m also open to being surprised. My skepticism is mainly because I already have a zillion ways for people to contact me and I already run several IM/voice/video clients… so it’s really NOT clear to me that I need another one. Still, the interface looks interesting and they’ve incorporated many of the features you would see in Skype and other clients… presence, status messages, etc. Many of the features are intriguing, such as the ability to do video conferencing with up to six people.
So as the admitted chaser of bright shiny objects that I am, and since they do have a Mac version – and my Mac has a webcam, I’ve installed it. Of course, given that sites like this don’t yet support what DataPortability.org is aiming to do, I have no contacts, so it’s rather useless to me right now. Yes, I can use the “Find Friends” feature to import contacts from…
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Returning (at least for a moment) to the tried and true for group chat…. IRC
Continue Reading: Returning (at least for a moment) to the tried and true for group chat…. IRCIn the beginning, there was IRC.
Well, okay, not exactly… BITNET Relay was around before that and there were other multi-chat environments in some of the walled garden services (CompuServe, GENIE, etc.) and BBSs… but for most of us who were online from the late 1980s onward, IRC was the place to be for “chat” and realtime IM communication. Of course, it lived primarily in the geekier side of the Internet. The “real” Net users used IRC and looked down upon all the “newbies” who were drawn to these new IM services from ICQ, AOL and later MSN and a zillion others. Sure, they were pretty and had cute emoticons. Yeah, okay, so they could include videos and knew when other people were typing and had little “toast” popups… all that would just be added to IRC clients at some point. And, oh yes, I said “clientS” because of course we had many different clients that you could use for IRC from all different platforms. We had our bots and our “/me”. Clients had nick completion and a ton of other features. We were IRC users and we were vastly superior.
But over the last five years or so I noticed…
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Mashable: "Instant Messaging Toolbox: 90+ IM Tools"
Continue Reading: Mashable: "Instant Messaging Toolbox: 90+ IM Tools"Okay, so how many IM clients are you now running? Looking down at my laptop, I see 5 at the moment: MSN/WLM, Skype, GoogleTalk, Psi(Jabber) plus Mitel’s own product. I also sometimes have Gizmo and FWD running and use Miranda from time to time as well. I do have Yahoo!Messenger and AIM accounts, although I don’t honestly use them all that often. On my Blackberry I have IM+ and iSkoot… let’s call it 11or 12 of the consumer products that I normally have available. Per the list of 90+ IM tools out from Mashable yesterday, that still leaves me with around 80 or so to try. 🙂
What’s your count?
Technorati tags: IM -
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New version of IM+ out that lets you do Skype from your Blackberry…
Continue Reading: New version of IM+ out that lets you do Skype from your Blackberry…About a month ago, I wrote about the “IM+ for Skype” client that let you use Skype on your Blackberry. Well, a new version 2.5 is out now and Jim Courtney over at Skype Journal has a review. Jim is quite enthusiastic about a new feature that lets you specify the number at which IM+ will call you back (rather than only calling you back on your mobile). I also found this interesting:
As an added benefit, IM+ 2.5 will not only make calls to those in my Skype Contacts but also my Blackberry address book. In summary IM+ provides a very versatile way of combining access to both Skype and Blackberry resources.
Interesting to see the merger of Skype and Blackberry directories. I’ve not yet played with it and don’t see myself having the time to do so in the next bit, but Jim says he’ll be writing more in the time ahead about it.
Technorati tags: skype, blackberry, rim, im+, im, shape services, jim courtney, skype journal -
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iSkoot – cool idea for a Skype client for Blackberry, but I don’t see me using it much because…
Continue Reading: iSkoot – cool idea for a Skype client for Blackberry, but I don’t see me using it much because…Last week I wrote some first impressions of iSkoot, a new Skype client for Blackberry, and while I still think it’s a very cool idea, I don’t see myself using it all that much. Why not? Very simply…
Battery life!
Or the lack thereof. Yes, indeed, it all does seem to come down to batteries, and iSkoot seems to certainly consume its share of power. Now granted, my Blackberry 7290 is an older model and for all I know could probably use a new battery, but in “normal” operation, I can charge it up and then have it run for a good 3 or 4 days before it needs a recharge. However, start up iSkoot and I found I suddenly needed a recharge by the end of the day!
In fairness, iSkoot is not alone in this… the other Blackberry IM clients I’ve used, both the Windows Messenger client and also most recently the IM+ client for Skype also have this same problem. I’m assuming it has something to do with the need to regularly use the data connection for updates to status and to update chat messages.
I can see this actually being most useful to me when I’m traveling and…
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iSkoot provides another Skype client for Blackberry devices… review – and my first reaction is that it has a challenge with the "instant" part of "instant messaging"
Continue Reading: iSkoot provides another Skype client for Blackberry devices… review – and my first reaction is that it has a challenge with the "instant" part of "instant messaging"NOTE: Please see the updates at the bottom of this post.
Back on Monday, Jim Courtney over at Skype Journal IM’d me (on Skype naturally) asking if he could do a test call to me on "another Skype client for the Blackberry". Naturally, I said yes and in a moment or so we were speaking. It turned out that he was using a new beta application from iSkoot. From the news release:
The new iSkoot v1.1 delivers a comprehensive mobile Skype experience on BlackBerry: With the click of a button, users can instantly chat with their Skype contacts, make and receive Skype calls, and use SkypeOut™ to inexpensively call regular phone numbers nearly anywhere in the world. iSkoot v1.1 also displays complete Skype contact status information, so BlackBerry users can see which friends, family members and business colleagues are available, as well as manage their own online presence. This latest release features a next generation, easy-to-use interface especially designed for BlackBerry users and will offer additional features soon. iSkoot works without any need for PCs, special hardware, custom phones or Wi-Fi hot spots, and utilizes the existing mobile network infrastructure to route Skype calls through the voice channel.
It…
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Making Skype calls from a Blackberry… (yes, it is true!) And where was the PC making the conf call??
Continue Reading: Making Skype calls from a Blackberry… (yes, it is true!) And where was the PC making the conf call??Today I called Alec Saunders via Skype. Not terribly unusual, really… except that I initiated the Skype call from my Blackberry! Back on Monday, Jim Courtney over at Skype Journal had posted a teaser about an application for the Blackberry that allowed you to use Skype IM. Today my curiosity got the better of me and I had to IM Jim to get the info. I downloaded the app and promptly had to try it out… I guess by virtue of Alec being at the top of my contact list, he was my victim (I also know from past experience that he’s open to this kind of thing).
Tonight Jim has spilled the goods for all of us in the post rather dramatically titled “Skype on the Blackberry – A New Era in the AlwaysOn World“. It turns out to be an application called “IM+ for Skype” from a company called ShapeServices, which makes a variety of software products for PDAs (and specifically Blackberries). It turns out there was a news release about this back on May 7th, but I didn’t see any coverage of this at all. The app itself costs $25, but you can…
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Skype raises public chat limits to 150 – but why do I see 200 in a chat room?
Continue Reading: Skype raises public chat limits to 150 – but why do I see 200 in a chat room?Today Skype announced that you could now have up to 150 people in a public chat session. They had quietly rolled this out a bit ago, but I only noticed then because I monitor and participate in a couple of Skype public chats that focus on new releases/features of Skype and development issues.
There does, though, seem to be a continuing puzzle around discrepancies regarding the actual limits. Ask any 4 people in a Skype public chat to type “/info” on the command line and relay the result… and you’ll probably get four very different answers. I just did that in one public chat (Update: it was the “Skype Developer community public chat“) and, as shown in the graphic, showed a total of 201 people in a chat session… with the limit theoretically being 150! Someone else in the chat did the same command and showed 122 people. At various times in the past, we’ve done similar tests and found that there’s a very wide range of numbers.
One has to wonder… is this something about the peer-to-peer “cloud” that makes up the Skype infrastructure? Is this a convergence issue? i.e. over time the numbers will converge to a…