The other down side is “status messages” or “mood messages” that you can set in the IM clients. Each IM service tries to differentiate with unique features-and they aren’t always supported by all-in-one clients like Adium. I’m not aware that voice and video works over those services via Adium. I haven’t tried file transfer using the various services via Adium, so I don’t know how that works. I haven’t tried it with recent Adium builds, but in the past when I wanted to do an encrypted Jabber session, I had to switch to using Psi. You have one set of status states, which may or may not map to all the status states available on your service (for instance, maybe the IM service has a status “out for dinner”). But you can’t necessarily use all the features of the given service. You can receive IM messages from all the various services. The down side of a single client is that of course you are in the old “jack of all trades, master of none” scenario. Adium’s interface nicely lets you have a single entry for a person with multiple IM contacts, so you can unify your directory to be able to reach people in different contexts. What’s great about all this is that you again have a single IM client that lets you have a single directory for corporate contacts as well as personal contacts. ![]() Does that include Microsoft OCS? I don’t know, but it would be interesting if it did. Jabber support can of course work with internal Jabber servers and SIP/SIMPLE support could work with platforms supporting SIMPLE. The list directly includes Lotus Sametime and Novell GroupWise. The curious aspect that caught my attention was the support Adium has for enterprise IM systems. At one point I did run multiple clients but now just for my own sanity I use just one IM client (actually two, but more on that below). Now you might say… so why do you have all these services, anyway? Well, I’ve been online since the mid-1980’s and generally my work has always involved keeping up with new technology, so I’ve always dabbled in various services and slowly you develop this accretion of new IM accounts-each that different friends and others use. If I look at my own usage, I use Adium to unify:Īll of those in one client with one directory of users and one window for chats (each on their own tab-and yes, I could have chats in separate windows but I generally choose not to do so). ![]() Since I was updating Adium at the time, I took a moment to look at all the different protocols that Adium now supports… as seen in the screenshot on the right side of this post. Somewhat ironically, there was a discussion going on in a Skype groupchat in which I participate about the various IM protocols and whether anyone really used GTalk, etc. (And if you are a Yahoo IM user, you really need to get the 1.3.2b1 beta.) I was reminded of this fact this morning when I received a message saying that an update was available for Adium on my Mac that solved a really annoying disconnection problem with Yahoo!Messenger. Why not? Simple… we’ve unified the IM services on the client side and basically stopped caring about the various services and protocols. Odds are that if you are an IM user like me, you probably don’t. Do you care any more about zillion different IM services? Do you care about the IM protocol wars that have plagued the usage of IM for the last years?
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