IM Showdown 2011: Four Chat Clients Face Off

Posted 07/05/2011 at 2:04pm | by David Murphy

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Ding! Ding! Ding ding ding! We’ve come a long way since the early days of America Online, a time when instant messaging was but a one-ISP fad and that unnatural blast of noise from your sound card (if you were lucky enough to have one) was the run-to-the-living-room signal that a new message awaited.

Well, OK, maybe the message noises haven’t much changed, but the instant messaging itself has blown up into a digital smorgasbord of chatting platforms and all sorts of different ways to access them. We have the main instant message chatting services from Yahoo. From AOL. From Google. We have chatting services built into our favorite social websites (Facebook). Into our gaming platforms (Steam). Into our voice-chatting applications (Teamspeak). What is Twitter if not an instant message account to the world?

And we’re not just instant messaging each other on our personal time. Instant messaging permeates our entire day. According to a survey commissioned by Microsoft this year, 42 percent of 1,268 professionals consider instant messaging the most effective method for communicating with colleagues at the office. Even more eye-opening, 14 percent of those surveyed think their instant message use has grown at work over the past year (and 71 percent felt it stayed the same).

Made my case yet? Great. So now that we’re all chained to our various instant messaging networks, what’s the best way to access them? That’s where we come in. We’ll be pitting four of the top instant messaging clients in a no-holds-barred battle for supremacy: To the victor belong the spoils, or a happy home on your desktop and laptop PC forevermore.

Let’s begin.

Pidgin

Part of Pidgin’s beauty stems from its simplicity. At its core, Pidgin is just an instant messaging app: No frilly tie-ins to other social media components, no 85 pop-ups to appear each and every time one of your friends Tweets a cat picture, no absurdly complicated user interface with more buttons than you have instant messaging friends.

You don’t have to create an account on any kind of Pidgin service to use the app; instead, you simply enter in your login credentials to your accounts on one of 18 different protocols (as of this article’s writing), which includes services like Google Talk (or anything else based on XMPP, like Facebook chat), AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, and Bonjour, to name a few.

Pidgin uses simple, tabbed chat windows to hold your conversations. It’s easy to change up some characteristics of your font on-the-fly, but you have to do so over multiple clicks on a small menu—you can’t just select a new typeface and size using a typical Word-style drop-down selector. Pidgin can log your conversations as simple .HTML files, and the app can even execute a separate application, sound, or specific notification whenever a buddy performs a range of actions (including logging on). Pidgin comes with plugins that you can enable to add other features to the IM program, but there’s no central repository delivered within the app to allow you to download more.

Digsby

When you set up an account with Digsby, your account settings for the various services the program supports (12 in all, including Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, and ICQ) will follow you wherever you happen to install the application. That includes a “portable” option that can even install a self-contained version of Digsby on a USB key. One of the first things you'll notice about actually using Digsby is the ads. Yep, alongside Digsby's centralized instant messaging services you get, by default, ads at the bottom of your IM windows. While this initially seems like a sizeable detraction from the service, the ads can be turned off by going to the Conversations menu and unclicking the box next to Support Digsby development with an ad.

We especially like how Digsby manages to mash all the various ways you’d need to contact a person within a single window. It’s super-useful to be able to both IM and e-mail a person without having to switch out of the IM client, and you can even add a personal email address to any contact that’s more accurate than Digsby’s default selection (it’s doubtful that you’d want to email your friends through their AOL Mail addresses, for example). Also built into the program is support for all the major social networks—Well, mainly Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Myspace (does that even count anymore?). You can view the latest updates on any of these via Digsby, although the implementation is a bit crude for our liking.

While Digsby’s layout looks like a cacophony at first, it’s easily cleaned up. Merging multiple contacts is as easy as drag-and-dropping them over each other, and you can detail the look and feel of your Buddy List exactly as you want to via Digsby’s advanced layout settings. Although Digsby comes with no third-party plugin support per se, you can use the app to create your own Web-based widget to talk to various strangers online—and that’s pretty cool. You know what would be cooler? Digsby apps for mobile devices!