Community Newsletter: Q&A forum: 3/3/06 What's the best instant messenger?

If you are a minor, it makes sense to take steps to hide your identity to the maximum extent possible, if you may be communicating with strangers.

But it was more convenient for me to use a handle that was not readily identifiable as mine when communicating in public forums for other reasons. On a former job, there were specific rules for outside communications. It was not practical for me to run every comment by somebody to get it approved for publication if it were meant for an Internet forum. Due to the nature of my work, if I stated an off the cuff opinion about anything, it could have been misconstrued as the opinion of my company, and could have come back to bite them. They did not want some lawyer standing up in court asking, "Isn't it true that Mr. xxxxxx of your company said the opposite of that on July 15th?"

It's not that people from my company would have been expected to be giving off the cuff opinions that were wrong, but it was also not reasonable to expect that we would research everything we posted to make sure that our statistics were exactly in line with our research and so forth.

I've used instant messaging for many years, MSN, AIM, yahoo. I have friends in each one that just stick to that and that's great...but since having 4 IM clients running all the time is a dog to my computer, I ran Trillian 2.0 for some time. When it was time to upgrade to V3 that was just as bad, if not WORSE than running all the individual chat clients at once! Trillian was hardcore on my computer but I tollerated it because it had all the plugins and looked great. Then I found GAIM. Quick to load, had a bunch of great plugins, and the options seem endless because of it's ''open source'' approach. Do a google search for GAIM and once you've goet that all figured out, search for GAIM plugins. Enjoy it! Only downside, when doing a video/audio chat I have to either 1. call on the phone or 2. open up yahoo (or other) which has this. But since I use instant messaging more to insant message most of the time....this works for me I believe GAIM does have an "unofficial" version that supports some of these features also but won't be in the main version until all bugs are worked out

You've posed two totally different questions: employers using open IM clients to run business communications over, and how to keep your home network secure.

Most employers who REQUIRE users to use IM will host their own IM server on the company's LAN (usually a Jabber server) and run an in-house client, not visible from the Big I, such as a ''SameTime'' setup, or something of that ilk. Contains all the same features of AIM, but it's internal to your company's network. It's rare to find a company that authorizes, not to mention mandates, employees use a network outside of their own. It's just asking for all sorts of legal trouble.

Now, as for your second question. I can understand the dangers you are concerned about. Corporations mandate so much software be placed on their gear that you have no idea what it's doing to your network or the other machines on it. You want to make sure that you're covering all the bases when you set up your home systems. To that end, there are several things you can do to help keep your network safe:

1. Run virus scanners on everything. It almost goes without saying these days, but if it's connected to the Internet, run a virus scanner and update it daily. Heck, run two. Now, as was mentioned in the winning answer, IM clients are generally safe to run, but their software is quite bloated, the unified clients being the notable exceptions (I'm a Trillian junkie). Be wary, though, of strangers IM'ing you and asking you to ''check out their webcam by clicking this link'' or ''you've just won the lottery, click here to claim your prize.'' Chances are, you didn't win the lottery.

2. On your Fort Knox machines, run personal firewall software, even if you're behind a hardware firewall. Your work PC may be trying to communicate with your home PC's without your consent. A good software firewall (try ZoneAlarm) will alert you any time anything tries to communicate with that PC.

That's probably all you'll need to do from a base level. From here on out, we're getting into some really paranoid setups, so be warned, this is not for the faint-hearted.

3. Set up two subnets, and don't bridge them. From your hardware firewall, you could set up two networks, a 192.168.1.X network, and a 192.168.2.X network, where your work laptop would be on one subnet, and your Fort Knox machines would be on another. Your hardware firewall at 192.168.1.1 would still be the gateway for both networks, but there would be no routes from the .1 network to the .2 network, and vice versa (Now, network junkies will balk because there will be one host route from 192.168.2.X to 192.168.1.1, but I'm trying not to get lost in the weeds here). Therefore, you could logically isolate the work laptop from the other machines.

3. If you still are uneasy about subnetting, you can set up a DMZ. This solution requires TWO hardware firewalls connected in series between your ISP's connection and your Fort Knox systems. The space between the 1st and 2nd firewalls is known as the DMZ. You will connect your work laptop there. This setup will allow your work laptop to communicate freely with the Internet, but any attempts to communicate with anything beyond the second firewall will stop there. Your Fort Knox machines will be isolated from anything connected in the DMZ, but will still be able to communicate freely with the Big I. Note, though, that there may be issues with NAT and such between the two firewalls, so such a setup may be challenging.

HTH
Cheers
CJ

I have friends on all three major IM's so I download Trillian and now see all of them with 1 program. Works for me.

Lee

Am I missing something or did you not answer the question? the question was ,whats the best instant messenger and what is your response. just give the name nothing more please

To tell the truth I think that IM and chat in general is a blight on civilization.

I agree with you "Waste of time in general"; chatting with strangers that you may never even meet or want to meet is a waste of time. The way to meet people is by doing things that you enjoy doing & going to places you enjoy going to. You are sure that at least you have something in common. In other words get a life. Where I disagree, is using messenger instead of the telephone. I have sons in Europe, Arizona, & Florida. I am retired, widowed, senior citizen on a fixed income. Only one of my sons can afford phone calls, so it is the one way that I can always reach them. Every day if I wish. I use Yahoo because all of my children and distant friends and relatives use it. They get my offline messages too. Having a hobby of photography, I take all the family photos at our regular holiday reunions and yahoo makes it easy to send them to every one.

It never ceases to amaze me that legitimate contenders are excluded based on various subjective assumptions in the technology world, but are perfectly acceptable in, for example, the automotive world.
For instance, anybody that has used iChat on a mac with an iSight camera would no doubt see it as at least one of the best if not the best IM application. It is easy to use, you can video conference with multiple people at the same time, the video is clear and clean, the interface is absolutely fantastic and the features are very good quality. So, while this is not even mentioned (though one could argue that it has limited compatibility with AIM) because of whatever subjective assertions, in the automotive world, nobody seems to have a problem with naming a Maybach or Bentley or Ferrari the best vehicle even though, as a percentage, there are literally a factor of "hundreds of thousands" times less people able to consider those vehicles as a viable option. CNET, what's going on? There are 30 million active Mac OS X users... certainly that is a much bigger population than those able to buy a Maybach, Bentley, or Ferrari...

Just get a screen name on the major ones then use Trillian to sign in. This way you use only one interface (less clutter and CPU usage) and you can communicate with almost all your friends and family no matter which one they use.

You used to be able to get a program called "die bot die",which cut out interruptions from bots considerably if not altoghether.I haven't used it in 3 years,but it's probably still around.

The best IM is he one that most of your friends use. That can be AIM, YIM, the microsoft IM, ICQ (which by the way is owned by AOL.)

I use YIM and ICQ though not at the same time...

BEST to you

The free Skype software is more known for its VOIP calls but its bundled IM software is also working fine.

It has all the bells and whistles of the other IM softwares and it has a huge network of users (more than 200 mil. downloads sofar).

It's most probably the prefered IM among the business users since, in a single package you can:
- call another SKYPE user for free
- call a "normal" phone number at very low prices and sound quality is pretty good (if you use a broadband connection like ADSL)
- send an instant message + send files (very important for business users: you can keep a record of messages sent and received)

Recently they also added video conferencing.

Why SKYPE has not been mentioned in your review ?

Kasey gives rather short shrift to the multi network IM clients. However, from a pure chat standpoint they are (with some reservations) a near perfect solution. They allow you to track your friends regardless of which of the major networks they use. I use Trillian. I have handles on MSN, AIM and Yahoo. I primarily chat with AIM people but have friends and colleagues who only use MSN and Yahoo. With Trillian, I have one application that tracks all three. It can also give you a popup when e-mail arrives on any of the IM services' associated mail services. Since my primary IM client is AIM, I also keep the AOL/AIM software open simultaneously so if I need to do a voice or video chat or to transfer a file, it's easy. It's not as fancy in the Icon or font or picture department. But for a grown up such as the retired woman who posed the question, these are frills that appeal mostly to teenagers. Trillian basic is still free.

But Kasey hasn't mentioned (perhaps someone else did) what I consider to be the best of the best: Skype. The free Skype IM client lets you chat as easily as any of the others and without (for now) any of the annoying ads or pop-ups. You can simply add others to your chat without having to go into chat rooms. In addition, and this is Skype's primary focus, it has the best voice chat around that I've heard. Even with a dial up connection it's good, with broadband the quality exceeds standard telephones to any other PX, Mac, or Linux computer on the internet anywhere. And now (for PC only so far) they've added video conferencing. For small fees, you can call virtually any standard phone in the world, you can have a standard phone number that rings on your computer your callers can leave voicemails and you can forward your skype to your cell or other phone and on a cell conduct chat using SMS. Unfortunately, unlike AIM, there's no ''online'' client like ''AIM Express'' that enables you to use the chat on a public computer or a friend's machine without installing software.

If this is mostly marketted as a voice-chat client, and I don't mean this lightly, why not just use the telephone?
granlov5

ICQ is still very nice client and for those folks like me who use multiple IM's, Trillian is the way to go, because you can run them all from one program.

The free version is very good, my only advice is to stay away from skins because they cause it open a lot slower.