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Like Trillian or GAIM?

99% of the problems I've encountered are due to people not using AIM or ICQ

I use Trillian because I used to use both AIM and MSN, so having them both seamlessly integrated as far as I was concerned was nifty. I also disliked all the AOL crap that often came with AIM. But then, that was a few years ago, so I suppose I've stuck with Trillian out of familiarity, that and I do still use MSN/Live on occasion.

those Clients allow greater control and/or functionality.

Trillain lets me use 5 IM services all at once, and to leave them running, I have only 102 people on ICQ or YIM, but i can still have it working, along with messenger where people pop up so rarely.
The Interface is good, the software stable and convenience great. (Added functionality in other terms).

And besides, I got those pictures just fine

Live Messenger is bloated with ads, slow and garish. Even a patched, ad-free version still looks like ass. Gaim (or Pidgin as it's called now) is simple, streamlined and reliable.

Of course, it's not like you have much of a choice when you dare to use an OS that isn't Windows.

And what "problems" are you having? The only ones I used to have were custom smileys that didn't show up and occasionally broken file transfers.

I use Trillian because i have to talk with people via MSN and ICQ and i don´t want more crap than necessary cluttering my monitor.

I hate the shit out of MSN and AIM clients.

MKSheppard wrote:Like Trillian or GAIM?

99% of the problems I've encountered are due to people not using AIM or ICQ

Because this way we only have to install one program instead of five or six. And AIM is a hideous client by itself.

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote:I use Trillian because I used to use both AIM and MSN, so having them both seamlessly integrated as far as I was concerned was nifty. I also disliked all the AOL crap that often came with AIM. But then, that was a few years ago, so I suppose I've stuck with Trillian out of familiarity, that and I do still use MSN/Live on occasion.

Agreed. The only time I load MSN is for webcams. File transfares work fine with trillian, direct transfares(for AIM) work great. Logging support is superior in GAIM/Trillian to both AIM and MSN.
Best of all, Trillian runs 5 clients(2 AIM, 1 YIM, 1 MSN) in the RAM usage of a single instance of YIM.

AOL's AIM software started to have spyware bundled with it a few years ago; there's no way I'm installing it on any of my systems. (As if some of AIM's ads playing audio while I'm trying to listen to music wasn't bad enough.)

Third-party clients also sometimes have nifty features like spellcheck, alias support, or tabs that the first-party clients don't have. (I don't know if the official clients support any of those features now; they didn't when I switched to Gaim, which is now Pidgin.)

I use trillian only at work because for whatever reason the regular aim client can't connect. However at home, all vanilla.

MKSheppard wrote:Like Trillian or GAIM?

99% of the problems I've encountered are due to people not using AIM or ICQ

Miranda

Connected to Skype, MSN, ICQ, AIM, YIM, Gtalk, IRC, and Jabber.

Uses 3 megs of ram. Up to twelve megs or so if I have several thousand message events loaded. Thousand.

Skype -alone- bloats to over 80 megabytes with a few hundred. Between all of those, using normal clients, I could probably break a gigabyte with the same level of activity and history management I do with Miranda if I were dumb enough to stick with the original clients for all of that.

Even ignoring the whole ads with sound business.

Meebo works fine as well. My only beef is lost connections from time to time.

Because the official clients are terrible.

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:Meebo works fine as well. My only beef is lost connections from time to time.

An excellent, web-based client - I used it while at work before to handle multiple IM mediums.

On my laptop, I use Adium (basically GAIM for Mac os X) for the reasons others have described. I'm connected to AIM, ICQ, YIM, and three forms of Jabber, I believe. All through the same client, and together they have a minimal impact on memory usage...unlike using separate clients for all of them.

Two reasons.
1. Aim had those annoying audio ads.
2. Trillian has tabbed chat windows.

The official client is annoying and I really don't want to have half a dozen programs open.

I use alternative chat clients on the Mac for MSN because MSN Messenger for Mac utterly sucks, lacking most of the basic newer features, and isn't even universal binary so it bogs the whole machine down as it runs in emulation.

But I go with standard clients on Windows and for everything but MSN on Mac.

People use GAIM on Linux because there aren't standard clients on Linux.

I switched because for whatever reason there was a brief time where AIM would always crash when sending an IM. I have no idea why but it did. So I switched. I don't know if that's still a problem but I've gotten to like Gaim so I stayed.

The only problem I've had is that sometimes file transfers don't work (but mostly they seem to...maybe that's just because of who sends me stuff having a compatible client though) and that sometimes I won't see stuff in the chat because of some weird character someone had (such as Hebrew ).

AIM stopped connecting for some reason so I switched to GAIM and haven't looked back.

I use Pidgin (as GAIM is now called) for three very good reasons:

1. Pidgin runs on Linux, FreeBSD and other OSes that I use, whereas AIM does not. Considering that I now spend the vast majority of my computing time in Linux (as in, 95%) and 100% of my personal computers have it installed, this is extremely important.

2. AIM is ad-supported. I find full audio ads to be extremely annoying when I'm trying to concentrate...why should I put up with that when an open source, ad free alternative exists?

3. Pidgin has a better UI design than AIM. Pidgin's UI also surpasses that of Trillian, in my opinion...I seriously hate Trillian.

I also use Kopete on some KDE only boxes, although it annoys me, and on my Crapintosh, when running slOwS X, I use iChat, which in marked contrast to the OS it runs atop, is actually a a fairly good program (and pretty fast also). I prefer Pidgin, but iChat is easily my second favorite IM client.

One thing I'm looking into doing longer term is using a cool command line IM client for UNIX like OSes. I can't remember the name of it off hand, and the UI is a tad complex, but ultimately, I can't think of anything cooler than using a CLI based IM client.

Note also that I do not share images or transfer files via IM at all...I used to, and for that, you really do need AIM proper. At this point in time though, that's no longer a big concern for me...[/list]

One thing I'm looking into doing longer term is using a cool command line IM client for UNIX like OSes. I can't remember the name of it off hand, and the UI is a tad complex, but ultimately, I can't think of anything cooler than using a CLI based IM client.

tmsnc. the coolest little IM client I know of, but it's been discontinued and the successor project isn't even in alpha yet.

There's Adium for MacOS X if you want a client that handles multiple systems. Finch and naim are the two big CLI clients, AFAIK.

Finch and naim are the two big CLI clients, AFAIK.

Do you have a link for Finch? I've heard about it but I can't find it on the Pidgin site.

ETA: never mind, I typed "finch" in the terminal and it started. Must've installed along with Pidgin itself.

Does using Google Talk as a multi-protocol client count as an "official client"? I use it for google talk stuff as well

Honestly though, because the official clients suck ass, I just can't wrap my head around how anyone could possibly think they are quality software (MSN/AIM).

I talk to online friends on AIM, Yahoo and MSN. Why the hell would I want three IM applications open in the background as opposed to one?