Multitasking: these days, it's a necessary part of any job and of daily life. So the ability to have a phone conversation while sending several instant messages simultaneously can sometimes make or break a business deal -- or your date for Friday night. Instant messaging is fast, convenient, and -- dare we say -- entertaining, whether you use it at work, at home, at school, on the go, or even on your mobile phone.
We looked at four leading instant messenger (IM) clients: AOL AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. All are free, although AOL and MSN offer additional features for a price. All are primarily geared toward casual Internet use (AOL AIM offers several business-related features as add-ons) but work acceptably in an office environment as well. In our reviews, we examined these programs' strengths and weaknesses with regard to setup and interface, feature set and customer service.
Unfortunately, none of these IM clients allows you to talk to friends who are registered with other services. In other words, your AIM account can't talk to you best friend's Yahoo account -- that is, unless you use another piece of software, such as Trillian. Trillian breaks the IM monopolies by supporting all four major clients: AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo, aggregating your accounts on each into one interface.
If you're concerned about security risks with instant messaging, specifically about buffer-overflow attacks (a common means of penetrating PC defences) and spim (IM spam), you could try IMsecure, a security product from Zone Labs (maker of the ZoneAlarm firewall). It's the only product of its kind, and it works with AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo.
Use our handy chart to compare the features and setup requirements of the Big Four IM clients.
| IM clients' vital statistics | ||||
| AOL AIM 5.5 |
ICQ 4.1 |
MSN Messenger 6.2 |
Yahoo Messenger 6.0 |
|
| Registration information | Asks somewhat intrusive questions | Asks personal information that is optional | Asks extremely intrusive questions | Asks less-intrusive questions |
| What you can customise | Backgrounds | Skins, backgrounds, keyboard shortcuts | Backgrounds | Backgrounds, skins |
| Business features | Lightbridge Web-based conference calling (£); WebEx Web-based video- conferencing (£) | Voice and video | Video, voice and whiteboard (£) | Video and voice |
| Works with mobile phone | Yes, 2-way | Yes, 2-way | Yes, 2-way | Yes, 2-way |
| Technical support | Support email (24-hour response), FAQ | Support email (24-hour response), FAQ | Forum, email, FAQ | FAQs only |
Note: £ denotes services that require additional fees.
Talkback
What about jabber?
Jabber doesn't have a public network, so not really relevant to the home market. If you're looking at enterprise IM, then there are many options, and Jabber is one of them.
What?
The Jabber Network is even non-proprietary, thus much more public than all the commercial ones!
So how many people do you see using a public Jabber network? It's an open protocol, but not really used much publicly, don't you think?
Let's not forget about the advances of open Jabber source. A lot of new IMs use Jabber technologu what makes it possible to comminicate users from different IM Clients together.
Hello Robert - I wonder if you looked at any subscription services like VMdirect's Hello World? VMdirect offers professional streaming video for video-IM (up to 4 online), video and text emails, and business subscribers also have live broadcasting and video-on-demand for their web pages. Subscriptions start at $9.95 per month. You design your own graphics banners and url links, and there are no company advertisements! The service will soon roll out worldwide (currently available in the USA, UK, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand). For overview see http://www.v-im.co.uk
You also forgot xfire lol.