What Makes a Good IM Client?

thesaint05 asks: "So I was sitting here at my job where and IM is a pretty integral part of communicating intra-office. However, I have 3 different clients installed, and each has a different user base. Within the office we have an SIP server and use Windows Messenger. The Google Talk client is for colleagues and friends on the cutting edge, and AIM is used by pretty much everybody else (including a bunch of clients). So, after holding 3 different conversations simultaneously on all 3 clients (Windows Messenger with a colleague, AIM with my girlfriend, and Google Talk with a friend at a different tech company) I got to wondering, what are the strengths and weaknesses of all of these clients? Which do you use and why? If you could combine features from all of the IM clients out there, what would they be?"

Comments

Plunggable modules like Firefox anyone?

[Hurricane78]

I guess the main thing would be: Build a core that has
- one side to plug messenger network protocols with passing trough *all* functionality of all present and if possible all future networks
- another side where you can plug in functionality like on firefox.
- a third interface to the core for ui/theme support by translation from theme data to a set of widgets and functionality.

i guess most of this is already done. in

    miranda

but a thing that is missing is probably the lightweight style that extensions on firefox have. it's jsut javascript with xml. so everybody can start pretty quick and add own stuff.
if this will become possible in miranda (i'm sorry but i don't know if it already is...), then why bother with other stuff because we already got the perfect messenger. :)

"Perfection by customizability trough community"^TM.

P.S.: Why doesn't extrans work anymore??

Open Standard Protocols vs. Closed Communities

[billstewart]

For me the most important features in an IM client are a tradeoff between

• Open Standard Protocols that aren't locked into any specific client or implementation or ISP, and include whatever features happen to be important to what I'm doing (e.g. encryption on messages, file transfers, integration with other applications so my outdoor thermometer can IM my PC weatherbot or whatever.) The big players here have been Jabber and IRC, and SIP is emerging because it's the market direction for VOIP protocols (and VOIP is really just a Presense Server plus a specific set of Media Connections, just as IM is) and because it supports Proxy servers so you can connect different SIP systems together in various ways and build cool interconnections between phones, PCs, and other widgets.
• User communities that include the people I want to talk to - Primarily this means "It reaches my coworkers, so I can have an IM conversation while I'm on a long phone call." For this, I'd prefer if the communities I care about used open standards, but it's more important that everybody's on the same presence server and there's some integration with the corporate phone/HR database so you can look up people easily. My current work IM environment has been Jabber-based, but we've just gotten some new system with Shiny Friendly Icons and Couch-Potato Non-technical-User documentation and no real information about it; perhaps if everybody switches to it it'll actually be useful.

They're fairly orthogonal goals (:-) Some people deal with this by using multiple-protocol-multiple-server Swiss-Army-Knife IM clients, but for the most part I'd rather not have IM from random people or my AOL-using mother-in-law, so if that means that I'm using one client on my work PC to talk to coworkers and another client on my home PC to talk to my toaster, that's ok.

Re:numbers are good

[Moofie]

Heh. Mine was below 135000. n00b.