Trillian Astra<\/a>. If memory serves, it’ll do everything for you except make you coffee in the morning (and still may not include an online widget). Whether or not the features are actually worth the cost of developing, I guess only time will tell.<\/p>\nwww.ceruleanstudios.com\/learn<\/p>\n
Gabbly: This incredibly odd little app allows you to discuss any website with anyone else that wants to discuss that website. Simply put gabbly.com\/ before any url (e.g. gabbly.com\/ahniwa.com\/blog) and you’ll see the website with an included gabbly chat box. You can chat with anyone else who did the same thing. Technically, this is more a chatroom than an IM, but it’s kind of neat. Someone noted in my web perusal that you could use Gabbly in an online learning environment by pushing Gabbly links out to a group of people, thereby jumping with an entire class (for instance) from page to page.<\/p>\n
gabbly.com<\/p>\n
eBuddy: Supports AIM, MSN, and Yahoo. So no GoogleTalk \/ Jabber, which is annoying. Also seems fairly commercial (i.e. there are a lot of adverts on the website). Sorry, that’s all I got. Doesn’t appeal to me.<\/p>\n
www.ebuddy.com<\/p>\n
IMHaha: Very similar to Meebo, except drop GoogleTalk \/ Jabber and add QQ instead. Claims to use https:\/\/ so that you can IM securely. I don’t see any mention of a widget, and the lack of GTalk is a dealbreaker for me, again.<\/p>\n
www.imhaha.com<\/p>\n
ILoveIM: Allows web-based access to any one service: MSN, AIM, Yahoo, GTalk. That’s it.<\/p>\n
www.iloveim.com<\/p>\n
KoolIM: Meh, same sort of deal. Supports the same four as ILoveIM, plus ICQ. They claim they’ll add SMS support “soon”, which would be neat, but looking at their set-up, I somehow doubt that it’s really gonna happen.<\/p>\n
www.koolim.com<\/p>\n
Chatango: Chatango is all widgety, which is nice, but only supports it’s own service. Which means, in the end, people can only chat with you through the widget. The library at Oregon State University is using it, and I was impressed with how nice it looked (and subsequently disappointed that it didn’t support any third-party services).<\/p>\n
chatango.com<\/p>\n
Snimmer & Interaction: Both along the same lines as Chatango, in that they’re web-based. Snimmer uses one of your choice of messenging services, whereas Interaction uses its own service exclusively.<\/p>\n
www.interactionchat.com
\nwww.snimmer.com<\/p>\n
As far as embedded chat goes, MeeboMe appears the clear winner, despite its imperfections. Chatango and Plugoo are the runners-up. As for non-embedded chat, at least you’ve got choices! Unless you’re on OS X, and then your life is blessedly simple. Still, for windows, I’d recommend Pidgin. Trillian gets the silver.<\/p>\n
As far as embedded chat in libraries, LibSuccess has a nice list of who is using what<\/a>.<\/p>\nAt some point I’ll try and clean this up a bit, add better links, and rate things in more detail (just in case people find it useful).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Looking for the perfect IM client? Sorry, it doesn’t exist. Well, I don’t know. Maybe Adium is perfect, but it’s for OS X, so I’ll probably never know. In the meantime, here’s what my search has revealed (without value declaration or filtering). I’m specifically trying to measure things up to Meebo, and the MeeboMe widget, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,11,22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}