A look to Alternative Messengers

aMSNMSN and Yahoo, ICQ, AOL AIM… but they’re “not alone”: users can also choose a ”multi-protocol messenger”: we’re talking about free applications that can connect to the same server used by “official” messengers, offering a different interface, but the most important feature they have is the possibility to connect to several services at the same time.

The advantage is clear: a single application to stay connected to 2, 3, 4 services and to have the power to communicate with our friends, without asking to ourselve what service they prefer. In addiction, these messengers often don’t include annoying advertising that today fills MSN or ICQ.

Here are a list of the most famous alternative messengers:

  • Trillian (AOL, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo + IRC)
  • Gaim (AOL, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, GroupWise, Zephyr + IRC)
  • PalTalk (AOL, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo – with audio/video features)
  • Mercury (Java client for MSN, incorporates some special functions, like games)
  • Fire (for Macintosh OS X: AOL, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, Apple Bonjour + IRC)
  • aMSN (MSN client, also available for Linux, with several functions, including video chat and more)

This content was posted Tuesday 14 March 2006 on 8:35 pm in category Apps. You can follow the comments in this article with its dedicated feed in RSS 2.0. Here you can leave an answer. Pinging is not enabled.

2 commenti

  1. sarah said:
    March 14th, 2006

    There’s also Jabber. As a geek hag (not a geek, just hang around them too much), I’d give gaim my vote. I’ve used Trillian and Jabber in the past, but have stuck with gaim for quite a while now. What I really hate is when yahoo changes their protocols or settings or whatever and I can’t connect for days until some nice geek fixes it. They’ll never force me back into yahoo or msn!

  2. Stefan Horning said:
    March 25th, 2006

    Another Famous IM-Client I can`t see on your list is Miranda (
    http://www.miranda-im.org/ ).
    I never used it because I don`t use WIN very often. But it looks quite promising, and it`s Opensource. I won`t start with a list of Linux clients because it would be a little long. ;-)

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