Mum is looking to do a spot of Instant Messaging with her Amida Buddhism chums. (My, look at all those blogs! All down to Mum's example.)
I've been looking at IRC recently, and it's really nice for techies. I've been using Bersirc as a client and Freenode as a server, and it's dead good. I've had some really useful help with Spring on #spring, and #python is cool too. (Say "Hi" if you are around there - I'm on as "small_values".)
But is it good for non-techies? If not, what should I recommend to her instead? Trillian? Miranda? Using what protocol? ICQ? (Anyone mentioning MSN can bugger off. These people are Buddhists, and need to keep their souls pure.)
Posted to The Internet by Simon Brunning at June 23, 2005 01:03 PM>(Anyone mentioning MSN can bugger off. These people are Buddhists, and need to keep their souls pure.)
:-)
Posted by: Mark Matthews on June 23, 2005 01:42 PMMSN seems to be the most stable and professional of all the major networks. Yahoo is full of feebs, ICQ is bloatware.
If you want an open source version I'd go for GAIM (http://gaim.sourceforge.net/) over Trillian as Trillian is a god-awful program.
Posted by: Damien Ryan on June 23, 2005 02:34 PMApparantly, because my blog is hosted on Tripod it's considered questionable content...
Posted by: Damien Ryan on June 23, 2005 02:34 PMGAIM is great.
But I use it for MSN *gulp*.
ICQ was completely unreliable once firewalls became involved (in my experience).
Posted by: Darren on June 23, 2005 02:42 PMI've de-blacklisted tripod for the moment, Damien. Thanks, chaps.
Posted by: Simon Brunning on June 23, 2005 02:46 PMDon't you have to sigh over your first-born to Bill to get an MSN account? Freja would object!
Posted by: Simon Brunning on June 23, 2005 03:14 PMI'd go with AIM - most people have an AIM account, at least in my experience, and the client support for AIM is the best. It's also one of the easier of the IM protocols to script from Python, with good support in Twisted and other 3rd party libraries..
Jabber ! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabber
Posted by: greut on June 23, 2005 03:41 PMJabber using http://psi.affinix.com/
GAIM is brain-dead, especially its Jabber support (Miranda has the same problems as GAIM). Psi works on all major platforms (Unix/Linux/KDE systems, including an OSX native client and a native Win32 client). It is by far the most robust client I've seen for the core of Jabber and private messaging including encryption. MUC (multi-user-chat) works fine, but administration features aren't currently in the most recent build (although there are patches floating around I think if you want to try an alternative branch--I'd just wait until they're in the main branch sometime this summer).
Trillian gets my vote - avoids the advertising of the others and it doesn't matter which network her contacts are on, as it works with them all.
Posted by: Gwyn Evans on June 23, 2005 08:16 PMHey, miranda still works fine for me. It might take some time, but at least i can script it using a popular (although unfortunately not my favourite) scripting language: PHP 5.
Chatting on most of the protocols is supported (IRC, ICQ, Aim,Yahoo,Jabber, MSN, (where i live it's still f***i** popular), net send) you name it.
Futhermore, it provides file sends and receives on most of the protocols and the community is quite active. Multi user conferences is no problem either.
I think miranda is really cool, and solves most of at least, my problems. Trillian requires to much resources, and is to much focused on it's skins..
Gaim?! can't tell - haven't tried yet.. but i will, as soon as i cross the win* to *nix border, as time permits. Aim, Yahoo, MSN? All to big companies for me..
One problem sticks to my beloved Miranda - it's windows only .. (sob sob)
Posted by: gwork on June 23, 2005 11:04 PMOf course IRC is valuable for non-techies, IRC was there even before that "mighty" idea of instant messaging was born... people just were chatting 4 anf 5 and 6 years ago over IRC networks. Of course I'm on Freenode too (previously known as OpenProjects), because of the high techie level, but there is EfNet, and Undernet, and IRC-Hispano here in spain, where you can join almost every kind of channel you are looking for, and talk with so many diverse people...
Personally, I hate IM, well... hate is an ugly word... I do not like it, I don't know a feature you do not have in IRC, but I know of some IRC features IM lacks of...
(ahm!, and yeah #python is a nice place)
Posted by: Wu on June 24, 2005 01:40 AMSimon, all of the cool kids are using Jabber. You know it makes sense.
Let them pick their own client software.
Posted by: Andy Todd on June 24, 2005 01:56 PMDo they only intend to talk to each other or does the existing community around an IM service matter? Do they want to talk in secret? ( http://www.silcnet.org/ ) What OS are they using? Do they want to talk one-to-one or form channels / chat rooms?
Non-techies might find voice or video particularly compelling. GnomeMeeting ( http://www.gnomemeeting.org/ ) does video, voice, and text and gets great reviews ( http://software.newsforge.com/software/05/02/17/1914207.shtml?tid=130&tid=150 ). Skype ( http://www.skype.com/ ) is cross platform and does text-based IM in addition to VOIP. It's not Free software though... does that matter to (these) Buddhists?
Posted by: Joe on June 24, 2005 08:22 PMThe (so far 18) members of my Order live in Newcastle, Leicester, Sheffield, London, Manchester - and Tallahassee and Vancouver, sometimes working in Zambia, Hawaii, Vietnam and Delhi. So we can't always all get together for meetings so would like to use web-cams to keep in touch and conference. Confidentially. We are all non-techie and at a loss - but do know enough to not want to use Microsoft.
Posted by: Sujatin on June 25, 2005 05:37 PM