GAIM

I added a friend whose IM account is through AOL. Since I already have the MSN messenger client and Yahoo! messenger client running, I decided to try one of the multi-protocol IM clients rather than add another one.

Before getting too far along I created an AOL screenname. klbarrus was already taken (maybe by me some time ago! but I don't remember doing it and obviously wouldn't remember the password) so I tried variations of "dreadpirateroberts" until dreadpir8rob3rts was accepted.

After a search on Google I found GAIM, Miranda, and Trillian. All offered interop with MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, and other ones I'm not familiar with.

I started with GAIM. After a simple configuration screen I was up and running. I IM'ed a friend on each network just to make sure it was working, and everything was fine...

... until I decided to clean up my buddy list. On Yahoo! I have a "friends" group and a "work" group - this isn't to say I'm not friends with my coworkers! it is just a group so I can find people easier - while on MSN I have a "Friends" group and a "Work" group. Basically, different capitilization. So the GAIM buddy list had extra groups and I thought it would be nice to merge all my friends into a common group. I attempted to do this by dragging my Yahoo! friends to Friends, and everything seemed to be OK, until I got a weird status for some: "not on service list".

Hmmm. I quit the GAIM client and logged into the official Yahoo! client and discovered my Yahoo! friends were missing. So, I re-added them. Yahoo! requires the other person to approve an add, so I entered a brief explanation, along the lines of "I think I screwed up and deleted you".

Once that was finished up, I hit on the safer idea of renaming the groups with the official client. Thus, I changed "friends" to "Friends" and "work" to "Work" in the Yahoo! client. Later when I logged back in everything through GAIM, it worked as I had hoped: I had one Friends list and one Work list. One friend still showed up with an error status so I added her again through the official client, and now it seems to be just fine.

I like how GAIM implements chat - GAIM uses one conversation window and gives each conversation a separate tab. I prefer this over having a bunch of windows open all over the place. GAIM supports official client smileys, displays your friend's pictures, has nice buddy list status icons, and is easy to use. Some of my friends occasionally webcam, and getting that working might require the official client. Other than that, everything else is working fine.