Are you like many people and have an account on Facebook, Yahoo Instant Messenger, Google Talk, and other instant messaging programs? Tired of having to run each instant messenger program separately? Then here’s a solution for you.
- Download and install Pidgin, the free universal chat program. Pidgin is available for Windows, MacOSX, and Linux (For MacOSX users, you might want to check out Adium as an alternative to Pidgin — it has better support for Mac).
- Pidgin by default supports the following popular instant messaging accounts:
- AIM
- Bonjour
- Gadu-Gadu
- Google Talk
- Groupwise
- ICQ
- IRC
- MSN
- MySpaceIM
- SILC
- SIMPLE
- Sametime
- XMPP
- Yahoo!
- Zephyr
- When you run Pidgin for the first time, it should step you through a wizard to add each of your accounts. Or you can add and delete accounts under the Accounts >> Manage Accounts menu.
- For Facebook account support, you have to download a free plugin (at the time of writing this article the plugin wasn’t available for MacOSX :(
- Make sure to change the Facebook settings in Pidgin to get exactly what you want.
- You can log in to Facebook while running Pidgin with the Facebook plugin. Your chat text will show up in both places.
- For Skype support (instant messenging only, no voice/video chat), you have to download a free plugin here.
That’s it. Once you’re done, you only need to have Pidgin running to use the text chat features of all your IM accounts!
Note: Pidgin does not support all the bells and whistles which are proprietary in certain IM programs (animations, sharing files, etc). However check out the plug-ins menu in Pidgin and you’ll find some fairly good bells and whistles!
Note: Pidgin does not support some features like conference rooms / group chat.
Note: Pidgin does not support voice chat or video chat at the time this article was created.
