pidgin

Shantanu's Technophilic Musings: "This is a simple tool I wrote a few months ago to turn Pidgin, everyone’s favourite multi-client Instant Messenger (works with gtalk, msn, yahoo, aim etc), into a customized answering machine (and more) when you are away from your computer."

IT Wire: "Pidgin is multi-lingual. It will communicate with, and manage, your MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, AIM and other accounts all in the one package.

There's no need for loads of different IM clients. You can control each and every one from within Pidgin."

My Technophilic Musings: "This is a simple tool I wrote a few months ago to turn Pidgin, everyone’s favourite multi-client Instant Messenger...into a customized answering machine (and more) when you are away from your computer.

Open Computer: "Listed on the roadmap to Gnome 2.24 is the integration with Empathy, a multi-protocol IM client.

This integration could be a sign of a replacement for Pidgin and Ekiga with one single SIP and multi-protocol IM application."

Instant Messenger isn't just the favoured mode of communication for depressed teenagers avoiding homework; it can be invaluable for those urgent work questions that need an answer sharpish, too.

Unfortunately it's unlikely that all your friends and colleagues have the decency to choose the same messenging client - some will use Yahoo, others can dabble in Google Talk or AIM.

So what do you do to prevent your desktop becoming cluttered with buddy lists from all your different IM accounts?

Wired: "Pidgin, the multi-platform open-source IM client that used to be called Gaim, has a lot of fans. The recent version 2.4.0 removed the user's ability to manually resize the input box, and many of those fans got mad..."

As Wikipedia says, XMPP is “an open, XML-inspired protocol for near-real-time, extensible instant messaging and presence information.” It’s used by Jabber, the Gizmo Project, Google Talk, Pidgin, Kopete, and all sorts of open source instant messaging applications.

It can also be used by any applications you want to develop yourself to pass messages back and forth, for example.