I haven’t written about a piece of software in two years! Unbelievable, especially considering there is so much out there worth discussing. And so I break from my silence to talk about Pidgin, a instant messenger… with a difference.
Unlike Windows Live, Yahoo!, Gtalk and their ilk that are separate entities from one another, Pidgin lets you log into each of their instant chat accounts (and many more besides) using the one application. It DOES have competition that do the same thing but I’ve tried others in the past and I overall much prefer the clean interface of Pidgin.
Thanks to this all-in-one messenger I have pretty much abandoned logging into three or more bloated pieces of software when I want to talk to people and instead stick to this. A huge benefit to this change is I now use up a lot less memory. For example, Pidgin while logged into MSN, Yahoo! and Gtalk messengers used up just under 26,000K. To compare I shut it down completely and loaded the other three separately. Gtalk was using up just under 18,000K, Yahoo! came in at slightly below 37,000K and Windows Live with almost 41,000K. Under those circumstances I’m saving 70,000K which is a huge help to my ageing PC.
I should point out that I do have a few minor complaints to make, but I don’t think these are enough to put anyone off wanting to give this Open Source software a test drive. Firstly, for any accounts you have enabled if you set a status it will appear like that for them all. The reasoning is sound enough (you’re one person so you should have one status), but I feel like I’ve lost a bit of control due to that. A much bigger problem is transferring files. It is possible, but up to now I’ve found it to be incredibly slow.
In closing, if you tend to use messengers for voice chat, games, sending huge files etc. then Pidgin is probably not for you. If however you like a clean, straightforward and memory saving messenger that is still able to be nice to look at then I would definitely recommend you try Pidgin out.
Edit as of 7th, July 2008 – Oops! I typed the wrong name in the title and permalink. Fixed now.
Interesting!
Is that why when I was sending some Family Guy Episodes it was slower than normal?
It does sound like a great program though but I don’t really like the name Pidgin, does it actually mean anything?
I am glad that you posted about this because I may one day use it, so thank you.
No, I was using msn messenger. I think the connection was just slow that day.
I think the name is sort of a joke. On the website the way Pidgin is shown it’s as though the d and g are quotation marks, because we “chat” through messengers. Also because it’s a little like pigeon (and why you probably don’t like the name) and they were used as messengers at one point.
It is very cool and I definitely like it, but it does have a few issues so it wouldn’t be for everyone.
Right, stupid MSN always slow.
Okay, and yes you are right you know how I hate those flyings rats things.
*lol*
It does sound cool.