Feeling chatty?

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1575371]

MSN used to be my main one. Nowadays I think more people are talking to me over FB chat or Google Chat/Jabber (which hooks up to andrew@ducker.org.uk).

Comments

[dreema.livejournal.com]

I think it's a toss up between googlechat and MSN for me. I've given up on yahoo! cos they keep breaking the clients i use and ever since LJ did whatever they did their jabber has been completely unreliable

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Difficult set of answers ... I most frequently talk on Google Chat and Microsoft Communicator (I can do both on my phone as well as on my PC at work), but I talk to more people on Facebook ...

... so fewer people for longer on Google, a set of people often but short bursts at work on Communicator, and more people for shorter random conversations on Facebook.

Skype I only use for two or three people, and then mostly for video chat.

And very rarely IRC to chat on the filk channel.

[aitkendrum.livejournal.com]

Mostly FB but I use Meebo as my chat client and found this helps most of my contacts on less used networks keep in touch. MSN follows a close second.

[andrewducker]

Oh, I use Pidgin as my actual client. Is there anything Meebo does that Pidgin doesn't?

[aitkendrum.livejournal.com]

Probably not. Meebo recently added FB to the list of supported networks but Pidgin covers much the same though maybe not FB (looking at the site). I plumped for Meebo as it has a web based portal for chat, FF has a nice little plugin and it works fine with the iPhone, though not multitasking. Hopefully Jobs will fix that tonight in his WWDC address....

[aitkendrum.livejournal.com]

OK Pidgin has a FB plugin so no, Meebo has no real benefits over Pidgin except maybe the web portal?

[andrewducker]

Quiet possibly. You may also prefer the UI - I haven't used it myself, so I don't know if it's lovely :->

[andrewducker]

Facebook has a Jabber gateway nowadays, so you an use it from Pidgin. I certainly do :->

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

A Jabber gateway? Need moar info!

I was about to berate you for using Facebook chat because the website's so awful but if there's a Jabber gateway I could use, then that might make everything a lot nicer!

[andrewducker]

Assuming you're using Adium you can follow the instructions here:
http://www.facebook.com/sitetour/chat.php

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[0olong.livejournal.com]

It's good that, but it annoys me greatly that every time I log in via Jabber, it logs me into chat on the site, too, which I basically don't ever want to use. Hmph.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Given that Trillian hooks into MSN, Yahoo, Facebook and AIM (plus others, but those are the four I usually connect), I don't really notice which particular one any one person is using. The chat window's the same to me. The bulk of my contacts are usually FB or MSN but it's easier to classify it all as just "Trillian".

[red-phil.livejournal.com]

Ditto.

I tend to use whatever chat client the person I want to contact is using.

[deathboy.livejournal.com]

The majority of my contacts are still MSN, but that majority is decreasing, mostly to google talk, it seems.

I use Pidgin or Adium, depending on the platform I'm using at the time, so like many people here, I don't usually think about what system people are on, except that I don't have skype integrated properly yet, so I have to run that separately, which irks me :P

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I signed up for a Skype account, discovered that I couldn't use the chat functionality from inside Pidgin and dropped it. I don't actually need cheap voice calls, as my mobile comes with hundreds of minutes and my landline has free calls to other landlines.

[deathboy.livejournal.com]

Ah, I do need the voice calls (wife in the US and many business colleagues use it for conference calling).

And it's good at what it does, but I loathe its lack of integration. The only ways to get it into pidgin I saw were very hacky and unreliable, plus, then (of course), it doesn't actually take voice calls. Guh. Bloody proprietary protocols.

[andrewducker]

Well, with its godawful interface the only thing it has going for it is the proprietary protocols. If they were open protocols it would have about 10% of the marketshare it currently does...

[princealbert.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I use Trillian on PC and Meebo on Android fone so like Scott I dont care what one of the chats I'm using as long as its on one unified app.

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

I use MSN a lot for most people. However I no longer have access to it at work and the person I talk to most tends to chat via googletalk now instead, so they're probably about equal.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I answered "I don't chat online", but as usual the truth is a bit greyer than the absolute. The very rare times I do online chat it's usually MSN/Windows Whatever. I did IRC a couple of times for special events... but 99+% of the time I close the chat client upon boot-up.

-- Steve vastly prefers email; slower pace is balanced by the greater accuracy and depth of each message.

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

Oh and I LOATHE the facebook chat interface. It keeps logging me in and people try to talk to me on it and it steals the focus from whatever else I'm doing and erroneously reports whether I, or the other party, are still there or have gone offline.

[andrewducker]

I only use FB chat via Pidgin, the web interface irks me :->

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

I don't chat online very much, because I don't like realtime contact unless I'm in a very specific mood (although Twitter conversations often amount to IM by any other name...). I stay invisible in Google talk but sometimes talk to one or two people there (mostly my wife), and on the rare occasions I log on to Facebook (every week or two) if one of the friends I have no other contact with (mostly from the LJ Exodus) is on there I'll talk to them...

[seph-hazard.livejournal.com]

Complete toss-up between GChat and IRC. I'm basically always logged into both.

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

I am no longer reliably online and so don't have much use for chat. Back when I was reliably online, I used Pidgin for MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, AIM, and IRC.

Now I just have Google Talk running in my systray.

[werejud.livejournal.com]

I use skype on a daily basis, mostly for text communication. I do occasionally dip a toe in google chat's murky waters. Used to use IRC every day, but that was related to a specific game which I've since stopped playing.

[andrewducker]

I tried to use Skype for chat, and got very annoyed very quickly. I find Google Chat a lot better - mostly because I use it via Pidgin, which has an interface I like. And the chats are all archived on gmail, which is handy.

Are there advantages to Skype chat that I'm missing?

[0olong.livejournal.com]

I log in mainly for the video, and rarely for that. Something oddly entertaining and kind of comforting about it, I find. I might use the voice thing too if I could get it working in Ubuntu - actually, the machine I'm currently on does have properly working sound, I think, but I'm not feeling very chatty.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

This poll needs more options.

I run Pidgin, and it connects to Google Chat for personal stuff, MSN for one client, an internal XMPP("jabber") server for a second client, and I also use Skype for family overseas.

I use them all pretty interchangeably - and, more importantly, with the exception of Skype, I access them all simultaneously and seamlessly via the same interface.

[andrewducker]

I wasn't asking about the front end (although I am interested) - I was curious as to which network/protocol your chatting mostly occurred, because another friend had said that he'd noticed that a lot of his friends that had been on MSN or GChat had migrated over to FB chat.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The thing is, not only do I not know which, but I work to ensure that it doesn't matter which.

[andrewducker]

Oh, me too. One of the reasons I ran this poll was that I have no idea if the people who are talking to me are on FB or on GChat or MSN, they're all just windows in Pidgin.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

In fact I use:

- Gmail for friends
- IRC for hanging out with other developers, some of whom are friends :)
- MSN for main work
- Skype for some work contacts
- Facebook for when someone I haven't spoken to in ages happens to spot me online and bing me

[phillipalden.livejournal.com]

I just don't use chat. I don't play WoWC or other MMORGs, and my closest friends don't seem all that interested in chat.

It probably has to do with age. Chat seems to appeal to younger people, (teenagers in particular.) Maybe it's my age, or the culture I come from, but I'd rather have a conversation.

[andrewducker]

I have conversations on IM all the time!

[phillipalden.livejournal.com]

That's true. You can actually converse on IM.

I did it a bit years ago, but most of my friends just don't use IM or text messages, (which I'm thankful for because I don't like dealing with text messaging.)

[andrewducker]

I don't tend to use the phone for casual chatting - I tend to only use it when I have something to say, or when phoning my parents. Otherwise I feel like I'm intruding.

And most of my friends live a fair distance away, so meeting up is tricky to chat to most of them.

[cheekbones3.livejournal.com]

I very rarely chat online nowadays to people, most interactions being spontaneous via Facebook. However, given a choice, I use MSN.

[cybik.livejournal.com]

I very rarely talk to anyone online except my boyfriend, and that's almost entirely via skype. Other than that it's msn or google chat..

[draconid.livejournal.com]

I used to be a big IRCer until DDOSing crippled the network I was on (many many years ago) for a number of months. I ended up getting addicted to LJ and never did go back to IRC properly after that. I've never found any other form of chat fun or interesting - I like the fact that in IRC you don't have to have one-on-one chats and the randomness of many of the encounters. If I were to chat online I'd probably go back to IRC, but I'm just too shy for real-time chat nowadays.

[darkoshi]

I don't really chat online anymore because the few people I used to chat with on Yahoo seem to have stopped using it, or we all login so rarely that we don't cross paths anymore. I have no reason to try any of the other chat systems, as I know no one to use them with.

But at work we use Sametime to chat with co-workers. I didn't think of that while selecting my answer, as "work chat" is more work than chat.

[mair_in_grenderich]

i am usually logged into aim and msn via bitlbee. i only ever chat to my sister and she generally chats on msn unless she's trying to hide offline in which case she's only on aim.

i would like to get skype working via bitlbee as quite a few people now have me added on skype but it's not so convenient for my nomadic whatsit. but i haven't worked out if it's possible within my setup. skype seems to be the thing that people are adding me on recently...