Windows Developer Power Tools

13.7 Chatting with Anyone Using GAIM

Instant messaging has become a standard form of communication, alongside the telephone and email. It’s a great way to get help from a fellow developer or get a question answered by a business user without picking up the phone, walking down the hall, or waiting for an email response. One of the downsides of instant messaging, however, is the lack of a single universal format. There are a plethora of messenger clients, each of which uses its own proprietary format. It’s very easy to find yourself in the position where your friends use AOL, the company you are consulting for uses Yahoo!, and your developer buddies use MSN Messenger.

GAIM is an open source instant-messaging application that has been built to work with all the major instant messaging networks, and even some of the more obscure ones. At the time of this writing, GAIM users can talk with people on the following networks:

• AIM/ICQ

• IRC

• Jabber

• Y!M (Yahoo!)

• MSN

• Gadu-Gadu

• Zephyr

• SILC

• Novell

GAIM at a Glance
Tool	GAIM
Version covered	1.5
Home page	http://gaim.sourceforge.net
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/126
Summary	Open-source instant messaging application that works with Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Jabber, and more
License type	GPL
Online resources	IRC channels, FAQ, forum, mailing lists, bug tracker
Related tools in this book	Skype

Getting Started

Installers for Windows and various Linux distributions ...