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The Internet has brought about a lot of positives in the way we live, among them the ability to communicate with friends and family wherever they are. Usually it’s e-mail or instant messaging or a combination of both. So the thing is we tend to use more than one instant messaging client. Admit it, you do don’t you? And so when you do, it can be an exhausting task to keep up with all of them at the same time. Hence the need of applications such as this where you are able to manage all your chat clients at once via one simple application. Now wouldn't you want to make your life that much simpler?
Pidgin is compatible with all the popular chat networks as well as the not-so-popular ones and even those we’ve never heard of. So if you’re chatting via either AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, MySpaceIM, and Zephyr, you won’t have any problem. Pidgin also tells us that it can support even more with the use of plugins. Now ain’t that a treat, you chat whore?
At the time of writing, the latest release for Pidgin stood at 2.5.4 for Windows. At 13.6MB, the installer will take about 10-15 minutes to download with the most pedestrian of broadband connections. And once installed, it’ll take up about 30MB of your hard disk space. Pidgin’s interface is reminiscent of most IM clients you encounter which is a square box. First thing you’ll notice is that all your IM buddies from all different IM accounts (the ones you’ve added for Pidgin to manage of course) are all lined up in a list and separated by the categories you’ve named in their original chat clients.
This can cause quite a headache if your buddies list number in the hundreds. Unlike Digsby, Pidgin doesn’t have any indicator from whence came your contact whether it’s from your MSN, YM or Google Talk account and so on. The former uses a small logo on your contact’s profile picture to indicate which account they were imported from so for instance, if it was your Yahoo contact, you will see the famous Yahoo yellow smiley face. Looking at Pidgin, we wondered why it couldn’t do the same. But that little slight aside, Pidgin’s interface is much more refined and stable than Digsby’s.
If you want to enable notifications for actions
that happen such as your friends signing in or logging out, Pidgin doesn’t make it easy. Pidgin’s equivalent of notifications is its “Buddy Pounces.” What makes it so infuriating is that Pidgin requires you to set Buddy Pounces preference for each individual on your list. No problem if your friends list numbers one. Oops sorry. Moms don’t count. If your list number in the hundreds, then you’re in for an exhausting time.
Having tried our hands with Digsby, we felt that Pidgin came up short in many areas despite being the much more established application. In terms of features, Pidgin doesn’t have some of the more noteworthy ones we’ve seen such as email and social network integration but in terms of the sheer number of IM clients supported, Pidgin comes out on top.
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