Communicate Instantly with Everyone

We review fourteen instant messaging clients for the features they offer and find out which of them you'd prefer to use for chatting with your friends

Talk about the means of communication, and Instant
Messengers figure in the top three, after phones and e-mail. Despite the fact
that IMs are the latest entrants, most people have begun to use this mode as the
most preferred one. The biggest factor for this increasing affinity is that this
is the cheapest way to communicate besides being real time.

Instant messengers not only facilitate text-based chat, but
also provide point-to-point voice chat. Plus, few messengers allow you to share
applications and remote access to a computer. Not only this, you can even video
chat with your friends that combines audio also. Some messengers allow you to
transfer files amongst connected users, while chatting. Here, we have evaluated
fourteen Instant Messengers and compared their features.

Before we go on, how do these programs work? First, there
needs to be a central IM server that maintains user accounts and helps bounce
messages back and forth between the various users online. Some services also
allow you to leave a message (offline mesasges) in case the particular contact
is not online. Four of the messengers we've covered support multiple messaging
protocols (or services) and you can use such clients as a means to communicate
with all your contacts from one interface. In order to make the fullest use of
any instant messaging system, you need to have your contacts on that service. So
choose your client and service, carefully. We have not given any awards in this
shootout.

Yahoo! Messenger 7

http://messenger.yahoo.com

This IM client doesn't need any introduction. Yahoo! is one of the most widely used Instant Messengers in the world. The latest version of Yahoo! has many new features but the most interesting one is its PC-to-PC call feature, which allows you to make direct voice call to the user. The voice quality is crystal clear without any delay or jitter. 

Yahoo! Messenger, in the latest version, has added a photo-sharing feature that allows you to share photographs online with your friends.

The messenger lets you to see the other person whom you are chatting too, if both have the Webcams attached. If you have a good bandwidth, you get a good Web-cast reception. Another most often appreciated feature in Yahoo! is its music section. This lets you stream music from the Yahoo-streaming server. No other messenger has such a feature. And the list of features is not over yet, Yahoo! Messenger also lets you to play online games such as pool and chess with your fiends, plus you can have an online conference using its whiteboard feature.

While installing it from the Web if the connection goes down, the installation process starts from the scratch. The alternative is to download a complete package (choose the link in the 'Click here if download does not start... ' link) Yahoo! Messenger is also available for Mac platform. There is a provision for sending messages to your friends' cellphone. These are sent on as SMS messages. Due to a large number of features and the brilliancy with which it supports them, we have crowned Yahoo! with our Editor's Choice
award.

The latest version of YIM has something called LiveWords that when enabled watches your conversation for key phrases and lets you open search-results on those phrases. You can also select a phrase and click on the icon that appears to get a search-result popup.

MSN Messenger 7.5

http://messenger.msn.com

This one is a popular messenger from Microsoft, and being
adopted as a corporate messenger these days. The messenger is preferred due to
its security features. It uses a .NET Passport account to authenticate you to
the MSN Messenger service. It allows both audio and video, while you chat with
your friends. Plus you can exchange files while online. MSN messenger also lets
you give access to a machine running Windows OS for remote assistance and can be
used to share applications among your friends. Compared to Yahoo! Messenger, the
MSN is lighter and comes with tons of emoticons. In addition, it also allows you
send SMSs to your friends' cellphones.

Popular features include the ability to create and add your
own emoticons (static, animated image and Flash), backgrounds and environments.
MSN Messenger features a good audio and video conferencing system. But, at a
time you can chat only with one of your contacts on audio or video. There is a
way around-to add all of them to the same conversation. But this may not be a
good idea in all cases. Winks was a new feature introduced in this messenger
recently. This plays a short animated clip at both ends and resembles Yahoo!'s
Audibles feature.However, to play this, you require the Flash plugin installed
in your Web browser.

The Windows Messenger is needed to use some of the
features, like Whiteboard Sharing.  If
you need to keep track of what was said during conversations, the messenger can
be optionally configured to save a history of it automatically. This is saved
into an XML formatted file.

You can launch IM windows from MS Office applications if
your contacts' addresses appear in documents there. This is useful if you're
using it in your workplace.

ICQ 5

http://www.icq.com

The ICQ messenger is a lightweight client that
authenticates you for the service with an ID number unlike other instant
messengers which use an e-mail ID.  While
this messenger may not seem to be that popular an option among your friends, it
is widely used all over the world. The messenger has an extensive search option
and there it lets you search users by age group, tastes, country and
availability (online or offline).

ICQ supports all popular SMS gateways and allows you to
send SMSs to your friends free of cost. You can even voice chat with your
friends online. The messenger also has file-transfer capabilities, using which
you can exchange files with your friends online. In addition, its Xtraz feature
lets you play games and send personalized greeting cards to your friends. The
ICQ Xtraz platform enables it to present users with a selection of new services
as they are created, without the need for you to download a new client.

Xtraz also supports the creation of new ICQ features that
can be built separately from the core ICQ client and then automatically updated
over time.

GAIM

http://gaim.sourceforge.net

GAIM is a multi-protocol instant messaging client available
for Linux, BSD, MacOS X, and Windows platforms. It is compatible with messaging
services such as AIM (Oscar and TOC protocols), ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC,
Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, and Zephyr networks.

Plus, a user can login to multiple accounts on multiple IM
networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on AOL
Instant Messenger, talking to a friend on Yahoo Messenger, and sitting on an IRC
channel-all at the same time. Some of its features are as follows- Buddy
Pounces, which give the ability to notify you, send a message, play a sound or
run a program when a specific buddy goes away, signs online, or returns from
idle. GAIM also has a number of  plugins,
that consists of text replacement, a buddy ticker, extended message
notification, iconify on away and much more.

Currently GAIM does not feature support for file transfer.
But they plan to add support for this in its upcoming release. Presently, this
is its only minus point.

Google Talk 

http://www.google.com/talk

After the search engine success, Google has recently
launched its chat client called Google Talk. It's free and all you need is a
Gmail account in order to use this. It has a voice chat capability. Plus, like
Yahoo! Messenger, it alerts you when you receive a new e-mail in your Gmail
mailbox. You can instantly connect to your Gmail account and use its features
directly.

AIM

http://www.aim.com

This is a very popular messenger in the US. You don't have to be an AOL user
to use it. This program allows Internet users to communicate via private text
messages. Its other features include a user directory, personalized news, and a
neighborhood. AIM 5.9 lets you store and share digital photos with your friends
on IM. In addition, it supports conferencing and voice chat.

Rediff Bol 7.0

http://messenger.rediff.com

Rediff has also launched an Instant Messenger client for
those who use Rediffmail. It's a lightweight messenger that lets you chat
within the Rediff users. The messenger also has an option to send SMSs on
cellphones, but it is restricted to send only two SMS messages in a day.

If you want to have voice chat, the messenger connects you
via VoIP to the computers of the friends who you are chatting with.
That's not all. You have both file transfer and conferencing facilities
available on it.    

Other than regular instant messaging, Rediff BOL also
supports avatars (where you can create a personality for your online presence)
and chat rooms like the one from Yahoo!.

Cheeta Chat 

http://www.cheetachat.com

This is a chat client for Yahoo! and iChat. Compared to Yahoo! Messenger 7,
it is lighter. Call it a plus or a minus, but unlike the latest version of
Yahoo! where all the adult chat rooms are blocked, this client still has them.
The Cheeta Chat client also has a text-to-speech feature, which converts text to
speech and speaks audibly when you instruct the client to read the message for
you. This is only one of two clients (the other being YahElite) to feature this.
While it does not support Webcams, you can view the others Webcam on it. And for
messaging, Cheeta has interfaces, both in Java and DHTML formats.
Like the other clients, you can save transcripts to RTF and TXT formats,
create personalities and share your files. Similar to YahElite, Cheeta Chat lets
you connect to custom Yahoo servers when connectivity is poor.

mIRC

http://www.mirc.com

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is an old virtual meeting client available on the Internet mostly used by geeks for exchanging ideas. On IRC, you can participate in group discussions with the rest of the world on thousands of IRC channels. These channels are the analogs of 'chat rooms' available on other instant messaging platforms.The mIRC client requires you to know and type in commands for changing chat rooms and transferring files between the chat users inside the IRC channels. IRC has a huge number of channels, running on hundreds of IRC networks around the world. Before logging on to IRC, we advise you to beef up your firewall security.

YahElite

http://www.yahelite.org

While chatting in the Yahoo! chat rooms you get lots of
spam messages, text floods, unwanted PMs, sound bombs and other mischievous
stuff. To prevent such nonsense you can use YahElite.

This is a very powerful client with lots of features that
the other chat programs don't provide It has user notes, spam filters, custom
displays, saving chat transcripts and macros. Plus it has a text-to-speech
feature, which reads the text from the chat rooms for you. YahElite can also
search the chat rooms from Yahoo!. Voice and Video chat is very much there. This
is a client you could try if the regular YIM refuses to connect you.

Omega Messenger 2.3

http://www.omega-expert.com/messenger.html

Omega Messenger allows you to chat with anyone you want to.
It does not matter which messenger your friends are using, you can still
communicate with them using Omega.

It's a light interface with multi messenger support and
can connect MSN, Yahoo!, AIM and ICQ networks. With this you can have real-time
chat as well as conferences. It also supports file transfer from all the
above-mentioned networks.  You can
even chat simultaneously while transferring a file. Omega features emoticons and
the ability to download e-mail from your Yahoo and Hotmail accounts. This
messenger is available in both paid and free versions.

Trillan 

http://www.ceruleanstudios.com

Trillian is a feature-rich chat client, which can support
AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger and IRC. It provides capabilities and standard
features such as audio chat, file transfers, group chats, chat rooms, buddy
icons, multiple simultaneous connections to the same network, server-side
contact importing, typing notification, direct connection (AIM), proxy support,
encrypted messaging (AIM/ICQ), SMS support, and privacy settings.

If you're feeling breathless about this already,
there's one more-it has an instant lookup feature, which is integrated to
the Wikipedia resource. The latest version adds support to organize your contact
lists and edit AIM profiles.

Skype

http://www.skype.com

Skype is a popular VoIP client used in corporate houses nowadays. These
companies use it to conduct overseas voice calls over VoIP.
The reasons are two fold: Skype's great voice quality and the security
it provides. Data exchanged by Skype clients are subject to automatic end-to-end
encryption. You can talk to your friends that have Skype installed on their
machines for an unlimited time with a crystal clear voice quality and negligible
time lag. All you need are a good pair of headsets and you can have
uninterrupted voice communications. Also you can have regular chat sessions with
those who are connected to Skype online.  The
Skype client runs on a variety of platforms, including Mac OS X, Linux and PDAs.

Miranda

http://www.miranda-im.org

Like Trillan, Miranda is also a multi-protocol Instant
Messenger, specially designed to use minimum system resources.

It is an easy-to-use messenger that takes very little
memory and does not require installation- all you need to do is unzip the
download and run it right away. This messenger comes with few powerful plugin,
which make it extremely flexible.

Only the most basic features are built in. Currently there
are more than 350 plugins available for download that allow users to extend the
functionality in Miranda IM. Plugins can be installed to add support for ICQ,
AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo!, Gadu-Gadu, Tlen, Netsend and other protocols.

Sanjay Majumder and Sujay V Sarma