Electronic Communication

Does anyone remember the days of AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, or Yahoo! Messenger? How about ICQ? It seems almost as if today everyone has forgotten those in favor of a rather primitive (if only the chat feature is looked at) version of the once dominant instant messengers?

That's right, I am talking about Facebook Chat. Facebook Chat reminds me a lot about the early days of IM where everyone would be having some issue, back when I was on BigBlueBall.com. However now it seems the only problems you hear about are from Facebook, and really the only problems you experience are on Facebook's Chat. Recently(ish) they have switched over to an XMPP protocol for their chat which improved the experience seven-fold. XMPP is also known as Jabber which Google Talk uses, for those of you who have seen it in Gmail.

Why care about Facebook Chat? Quite simply: People see that as the only instant messenger now. I can not remember the last time I had a conversation on AIM or MSN. It is a shame really as I prefer client based instant messengers, not web based. I like that notification on my desktop and not having to always have that browser window open.

AIM solved this for me as in their latest stuff, as I have probably said before now lets you connect to Facebook Chat. You can also do this with Pidgin, Trillian, and Digsby, although I have had less of a success rate with those.

But is it just me or do you miss the days of AIM/MSN/Y! and desktop IMing?

Social Network Fiend

I have recently realized that social networks have completely changed how I use the internet and how I collaborate with people. After Digsby stopped working with Facebook chat for me I looked elsewhere. During this searching I found, yes I know but bear with me, AIM. The latest version of AIM had two major components integrated with it: Facebook Chat and this service called "Lifestream", which is all of your social networks in one place.

It worked. Getting AIM set up for Facebook was simple and so was Lifestream, everything was good except that I still had to run Digsby for all of my mail accounts, and the built in version of Lifestream didn't work quite as well I wanted, so I had to stick to Digsby for these services.

After realizing that Digsby wasn't working properly with MSN/WLM, I just decided to drop the program entirely. On Neowin there is a thread about "Apps For Windows 7 In Mind." These basically show notifications and support jumplists, something at first I thought was a novelty but really ended up being quite interesting. I downloaded "Gmail Notifier Plus" and it works fantastically. You can preview your messages, go to your inbox, even has support for Google Apps.

So I was set for mail, but what about everything else? AIM's built in lifestream didn't work as I needed it to so I went off searching for a Facebook/Twitter client with Windows 7 in mind. What did I come up with? MetroTwit and Fishbowl. MetroTwit uses the "Metro" look and feel and provides a pretty nice Twitter client, has Windows 7 integration such as notifications, it was great. However no Facebook support, which is where Fishbowl comes in. I really liked the Fishbowl application, it was essentially a more user-friendly version of Facebook built with Silverlight. Only problem is that the notifications in the taskbar didn't show all updates and there were no options to change this.

Back at square one, I decide to download the Official AOL Lifestream client. It is an Adobe AIR application, but this one works much better than the built in one with AIM. When you get new messages it blinks the taskbar icon. Not exactly Windows 7 integration but it at least did what I wanted it too and told me when new items came in.

Somewhat tempted to come up with my own application, I doubt with all of the many programs it is that difficult anyway. We'll see.

Links:
MetroTwit
AIM
Lifestream
Fishbowl
"Apps With Windows 7 In Mind"