Pidgin English? Nah...Pidgin Google, MSN, Yahoo, AOL, ICQ (and more) (Pidgin)

Member Name: mattygroves10

Product:	Pidgin
Date:	07/01/09 (202 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Reasonably easy to use meta-client allowing one program for many IM programs

Disadvantages: A bit geeky, poor help screens, not always hugely intutive

Once upon a time, I used AOL. I used it for email, and I used it for chat, and found it cool(ish...when it worked). I had one email address (not strictly true, actually, but work with me here) and one Instant Message (IM) handle. If people wanted to talk to me via the computer, they found me on AOL. I graduated from AOL as soon as I could, and discovered the joys of msn, live.co.uk, Googlemail and Googletalk, Yahoo, and Jabber - more chat clients than you can shake a stick at.

For a while, each time I turned on the computer, I'd open msn messenger (twice), Googletalk, AOL (two addresses) and Yahoo just so that people could find me by IM, depending on how long they'd known me (so which chat client they knew me on) and what they themselves were using (many Americans are still inexplicably wedded to AOL). As even more time went on, I used Jabber for some work contacts, and, indeed, IM became more important for work as I was employed by an American company - IM can be an efficient way to communicate (sometimes). I was getting rather bored with typing addresses and passwords (which were often slightly different, and so sometimes difficult to remember).

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What Pidgin Does
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Some clever folks came up with solutions to those problems. One such solution is Pidgin (yes, the spelling is correct). Pidgin is a 'universal chat client'. This means you can login to all your chat IDs from one little free, downloadable program. Spend around 10 minutes adding all your IM logins (and you can have multiple logins from one client - i.e. a work msn login and a personal one), customise your avatar if you wish, add any additional contacts, import your contacts from your IM clients, and you're ready to go. Doing all this really is quite straightforward (though the help area of the website http://pidgin.im/ tends to be biased towards the developer rather than the bog standard user). You can set up certain options globally (for all your accounts) or by an account by account basis (i.e. one icon for Google, and a different one for Yahoo).

It is important to note that Pidgin is not a chat network in itself - instead, it's a little piece of software that allows you to access all your chat accounts from one place. Pidgin isn't the only free program that does this, though it may be one of the most well known.

Pidgin is compatible with more chat programs than you are ever likely to need in a month of Sundays: "AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, MySpaceIM, and Zephyr. It can support many more with plugins." So says Pidgin itself. It is open source, and has a GNU licence (this is for geeks only - it means you can fiddle with the code and share it amongst your friends, basically, so long as your changes are open to everyone). It works within Windows and UNIX (including Linux) environments.

Pidgin also has plugins, so you can add functionality (of varying usefulness - I used to enjoy /sg-ball - if you typed that in, it would give you a random Stargate SG1 quote.) Like with Firefox, these plugins are usually developed by interested and talented users. This does of course mean that they vary in usefulness and stability, but they are all free, and can be disabled if you find problems. I am not a developer. I have downloaded add-ins, but haven't attempted to alter or mess with any of them.

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What I like
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The big upside of Pidgin is that it saves you logging into all your chat programmes separately. The add-ins are neat - like with Firefox, some are really useful, and others are funky and fun (and others are plain silly). As it's open source, there are frequent updates. It is free and ad-free. It supports a fair amount of typical IM functionality, including file transfers, away messages, icons, smilies and so forth (I've used much of this, though Pidgin's own website gave me the details to save you looking. The work I do for you!). A little icon sits in your system tray, making it easy to access and easy to get notifications.

The basics of Pidgin are easy to use, though, as I mentioned, the help section tends to be a wee bit technical for the average user (in my opinion). Sometimes, working out how to do fairly simple things can take longer than it should (such as getting Pidgin to start automatically on computer start up - it's not as straightforward as you'd think).

I have found Pidgin stable. It will automatically notify you when upgrades are available, though some upgrades don't support some add-ons, and getting the add-ins into the correct and useful folder (as it sets up a couple of folders when you first download the software) can sometimes be a little hit and miss.

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What I am not so keen on
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The text entry box doesn't thrill me. It has a very small (though enlargable - but once again, it's not immediately obvious how to do this) area for text entry. To use anything beyond the basic features can seem a bit ... long winded (though often it isn't really, it's just that since the site is very geek geared, it tends to assume a level of knowledge and indeed interest that may just not exist for the average user).

Although Pidgin supports many common features of chat clients, it doesn't support all features for all clients (for example, it doesn't seem to like accepting Google file transfers from people actually using the Google client - I'm not sure whether this is a Google problem or a Pidgin problem, but it's still a nuisance), and it doesn't seem to support video (web cams) at all. Even Googletalk now has a webcam client.

There is no support for email that I can see (there are now meta-clients that do support email) or social networking (i.e. Facebook, which also has a chat client).

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Recommendation and conclusion
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Pidgin is like a slicer, dicer, julienne fryer. It does lots of thing adequately. It is not, however, necessarily a perfect replacement for everything it purports to replace. It simply does not have all the feature of any of the individual clients. However, especially for many work purposes, if you simply need to IM using your keyboard (and not video or chat), it will do the job. If you have geek tendencies, you can fiddle and play with it, and relax in the knowledge that it's completely open source.

There are other meta-clients out there, and one in particular I like better. It's not the most user friendly, and it's not the prettiest, and not the most fully functioned. However, it is one of the most well known, most popular, and supported on the greatest number of platforms (Unix, Windows etc).

I will recommend it...but I will give you a clue - there is another meta-client I like better. But that's another subject for another day.

Summary: A decent, common and free meta IM client

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