Pidgin, or why 4 chat programs no longer suck my PC dry
Granted, my PC needs to be replaced (it is my trusty Sony Vaio that has been around the world with me for years)…but it was dragging, in some not-so-small part due to the number of IM/chat programs loaded on it. They all served a purpose, or different constituency:
- Skype for international friends in Italy, London, Thailand and beyond;
- Facebook chat for my kids and family;
- SameTime to talk with partners (including IBM);
- AIM to talk with other partners (including Cisco through a AIM/WebEx interface);
At work, we’d been using Skype for development collaboration and support. But Skype lately has been sluggish and hanging; yes, I know it is free, but it was time to find something that worked better. My developers wanted to use jabber, but I needed to keep contact with the systems listed above.
Enter PIDGIN. I’d done some testing on it before, when we were integrating our secure transport/delivery mechanism into various platforms. I did not know if it would tackle all of these networks. (more…)
