Pidgin Instant Messenger
Instant Messaging (IM) is one of the most widely practiced activities on the Internet for a large majority of users. Since the advent of Internet Relay Chat (IRC), instant messengers or IM clients have turned out be quite useful things. You must have had those instances, when you wanted to tell somebody something, but didn't consider it important enough to be put worthy of an email. As the popularity of the Internet expanded, numerous IM services came up around the world, with an equal number of discreet IM clients to choose from. Instant messaging itself has become a valuable educational tool, if it is used sensibly. Instant messaging allows users sitting far away from each to collaborate with each other online, in real time. The members very website, Open Source Weekend, for example held online meetings work on content and discuss it with each other, all in real-time.
To some, IMing is almost the sole purpose of using the Internet. And we are not just talking about high school students but also corporate houses who need real-time internal communications at all times. Instant Messaging is therefore used at varied levels and has its roots far deeper than the minds of most using it.
However, there is a catch – that you need to have all your friends using the same service that you use in order to communicate. This creates a problem generally, as a person would need to have an account on each of the individual services, and then, download each of their individual clients to keep in touch. Also, what if you have numerous accounts for dealing with different batches of people in the same service? Stand-alone clients offered by your provider might not allow you to use multiple accounts together. Nothing can be done about the first issue, until the service providers sit down and decide to start using one standard – but something can be done about the client problem, and here is where Pidgin instant messaging client, the open source answer to the problem flies in.
Pidgin (earlier known as Gaim) can connect to different messenger services – almost all major ones out there currently – and takes up much less system resources than if the individual applications for each service were to be fired up. You keep your PC running smooth, and at the same time, can communicate with all your friends from within one IM client. Depending upon the network used, it even supports rich text editing, emoticons, conferencing, file transfers, etc. One feature that it doesn't support is audio/video chat – however, this is undoubtedly a less-used feature, and for daily purposes, the advantage of having an IM client which uses less resources and can sign in to multiple networks and multiple accounts at a time far outweighs any drawbacks.