Once upon a time, there was ICQ.
Then came Yahoo Messenger, which could work through the university firewall, and linked into stock quotes.
Briefly, a fling with AOL Instant Messenger, which was regionally popular during my sojourn to Seattle.
MSN Messenger then became another, as nouveau “Netizens” used the instant messaging client that was preinstalled on Windows.
When Trillian appeared, I was overjoyed to consolidate all my messaging clients into one.
On and off, I toyed with other clients, like Miranda, but it wasn’t until the appearance of Gaim that I switched again. Gaim, with its simple interface and resource friendly ways, appealed to me much more than the flashy excesses of Trillian.
Also around the time of GAIM, I got second accounts for Yahoo and MSN: one for work contacts, one for personal contacts.
Then came the AJAX revolution, and I discovered Meebo. At last, everything I wanted: instant messaging for all networks, no installation required, centralize all my chat logs!
Except now… lost messages! I don’t know if it’s Meebo’s fault or the MSN network, but I’ve been sending messages that I later discovered went unreceived. So time to backtrack to the last known good state (Gaim, now called Pidgin) and see what else has changed besides the name.
Initial impressions are good. Smooth install, logical interface, and certainly more responsive than using a web-based IM. Since I still want all my log files in one place for searchability, and Pidgin doesn’t support remote logging yet, I put together a script to commit the local log files (plain text files) to a revision control system every night.
