History of IM

 

Some dinosaurs from the internet stone age might remember where the Instant messaging craze picked up. I made my acquaintance with the phenomenon with ICQ, the first (or one of the first) peer to peer messaging client.

This was soon followed by Yahoo and MSN launching their own instant messaging clients (MSN messenger 2.0 – thats the first MSN messenger I had installed, wouldnt work without a hotmail ID, hence, my Hotmail account which to this day is only used for *now* Windows Live Messenger Sign in). And for some reason (I guess it was the bells and whistles – and the server based contact list; backing up and porting the contact list wasn’t a feat most non-geek users can perform) ICQ fell into oblivion and was seldom heard from again. (For users like me, the web based icq client was another awesome feature that none of the other messengers had, but alas, the rest were close on its heel to follow with a similar offering).

Starting off with Yahoo!, MSN and ICQ… last year I ended up with a total of 6 IM applications on my computer.

1. Yahoo!
2. ICQ (just can’t seem to let it go)
3. Windows Live Messenger
4. Google
5. SameTime (IBM messenger for Lotus Notes)
6. Microsoft Communicator (porting from Notes to Microsoft Platform across the enterprise)
7. Skype ( a recent addition , but more towards voice messaging than text based messaging, hence i put it in a different category)

With all the different applications and their demands, doesn’t leave a lot of horsepower for much esle. Couple it up wiht MS outlook and a couple of Spreadsheets and Documents – not to mention a few browser windows – is all a poor PC can take before screaming out for Mercy!

Thats when I started exploring various Universal messengers, which would connect to most/all of these services in a single packae. The following messaging clients fulfill this purpose:

• Trillian
• Gaim (now known as PigDin)
• Miranda IM

Of these, Trillian being the most flashy is also very taxing on the CPU. Gaim is a decent solution that works for both Windows and linux based platforms. But for some reason I prefere Miranda, which, as claimed by its creators is "Smaller, Faster, Easier".

It connectst to Yahoo!, MsN, AOL, ICQ and Google out of the box.

Additional plugins allow the users to extend its functionality to connect to other IM services, such as SameTime and SIP.

Samtetime

The sametime plugins for miranda Im can be found on the following link:

http://forums.miranda-im.org/showthread.php?s=9bd1e19eb21ba4ccc86425dd3c14cbe9&t=4477

One problem I faced while trying to get this plugin to work was whenever I would enable this plugin, my application (miranda) would crash. For a while I gave up and switched to Trillian, which has an official IBM sametime Plugin, but due to memory and performance related issues decided to give Miranda another shot today.

As it turned out, the default settings for the Sametime Plugin for miranda has the client type set to "Custom". Since this plugin works in conjunction with the meanwhile library I tried switching the client type to "Meanwhile"…… and VOILA!!  had my Sametime working in a matter of minutes (see image below).

SIP (Microsoft Live Communication Server / Microsoft Communicator)

Following is the link for the plugin that enables you to connect to Microsoft live Communication server that uses the SIP protocol.

http://addons.miranda-im.org/details.php?action=viewfile&id=3046

For any issues regarding configuring your client to work with your Instant Messaging service feel free to drop me a line 🙂