Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Lion Edition

Many Chat Networks

iChat lets you reach out to chat partners on several different networks:

• The AIM network. If you’ve signed up for a free AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) account, you can chat with anyone in the 150 million-member AOL Instant Messenger network.

• The Yahoo Messenger network. Yes, kids, it’s true: you can chat with your Yahoo account, too, with all your Yahoo buddies.

• The Jabber network. Jabber is a chat network whose key virtue is its open-source origins. In other words, it wasn’t masterminded by some corporate media behemoth; it’s an all-volunteer effort, joined by thousands of programmers all over the world. There’s no one Jabber chat program (like AOL Instant Messenger). There are dozens, available for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Unix, iPhone, Palm organizers, and so on. They can all chat with one another across the Internet in one glorious frenzy of typing.

  And now there’s one more program that can join the party: iChat.

• Google Talk. Evidently, Google felt that there just weren’t enough different chat programs, because it released its own in 2005.

  Behind the scenes, it uses the Jabber network, so Google Talk doesn’t really count as a different network. But it does mean you can use iChat to converse with all those Google Talkers, too.

• Your own local network. Thanks to the Bonjour network-recognition technology, you can communicate with other Macs on your own office network without signing up for anything at all—and without being online. This is a terrific feature when you’re ...