Empathy is a messenging program built upon the Telepathy protocol which is based on Gossip. With the help of Telepathy, Empathy can easily communicate with other GNOME applications, for a seamless, integrated desktop experience. Empathy supports: Multiple protocols, file transfer via XMPP and local networks, voice and video support, limited IRC support, conversation theming, sharing of location, conversation logging, and much more. In this article I will walk you through the installation and setup of Empathy.

Installation

Empathy is quite easy to install. But before you go on with the attempt at installing, you should first check your Applications > Internet directory for the Empathy entry. If it’s there, you need not bother with the installation. If it is not there, continue on with this section.

To install Empathy follow these steps:

• Fire up your package management system (Synaptic, Ubuntu Software Center, gnome-packagekit, etc).
• Search for “empathy” (No quotes).
• Select the Empathy entry and mark for installation.
• Click Apply to install.

No you will find Empathy in Applications > Internet.

Adding your first account

When Empathy is open click on Edit > Accounts to open up the accounts editor. In this window follow these steps to create a new account:

1. Click the New button.
2. Select the type of account you want to create from the drop down.
3. Click the Create button.
4. Enter the credentials for the account you want to create.
5. Click the Connect button.

Figure 1

Once you click the Connect button you will be immediately taken to the main window (see Figure 1) where your buddies (if you have any) will all show up.

Figure 2

Empathy should behave precisely as you would expect it. After you create your account(s), one of the first things you can do is edit the personal information for each account. You can change your alias as well as your account avatar for each account you have configured. To do this click on Edit > Personal Information which will open up the PI Window (see Figure 2). You can change the information for different accounts by selecting the account to change from the drop down. To change the Avatar, simply click the icon button and locate a small image to use.

Connecting to IRC rooms

You can do away with your IRC client by using Empathy. To connect to an IRC room follow these steps:

1. Click Edit > Accounts
2. Click the Add button.
3. Select IRC from the account type drop down.
4. Click the Create button.
5. Select the server from the network drop down.
6. Enter any credentials you need to enter.
7. Click Connect.
8. Close the account creation window.
9. Click on Room > Join from the main window.
10. Select IRC from the dropdown.
11. Enter the room name you want to join.
12. Click Join.

A new window will open dedicated to your IRC chat room.

Gotcha

One of the issues you might come across with Empathy is that you can only send files to buddies on Jabber, Google Talk, and People Nearby services. All other accounts are out of luck.

Final thoughts

Empathy is an outstanding chat client that can be used for multiple and various services. Give it a try and you’ll find yourself never going back to your old client.

The client Coccinella takes the second path by adding new features like a whiteboard to the Instant Messenger. It can connect to any Jabber/XMPP messaging server (including MSN, ICQ, AOL Instant Messenger and Google Talk). But first the basics. The client has all the usual standard features like client lists, group chat, file transfers, avatars, emoticons and secure connections.

Besides that Coccinella supports Voice over IP connections and the previously mentioned whiteboard. Take a look at the screenshot below to get an understanding of how the chat whiteboard works.

That feature comes in pretty handy if you want to visualize information or just draw a nice heart to your loved one. The chat client comes with installers for Windows (Windows 98 to Windows XP, no Vista support yet), Apple Macintosh and Linux. The source is also available at the download page of the website.

It’s just a matter of finding the right service that is compatible to the mobile phone. In the case of the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch the My Digital Life website posted a nice trick. Users can grab the AIM client for their clients and install it on the device. Then it’s merely a question of adding phone numbers as clients in iChat or any other instant messaging client on the phone. To be precise the account name will be the complete phone number of the contact including country and area codes. A valid phone number would be +123456789 for example. The + sign has to stand at the beginning.

Now start the AIM client software and send the new contact a message. He will receive it as an SMS. His reply on the other hand will land directly in the AIM client software.

The benefit of this method is obviously that it is completely free if the Internet connection is free. Do you know other ways to send free SMS with the iPhone, iPod Touch or other mobile devices ?

It’s still a beta product but significant changes have been made over the last few months including new features, optimisation and bug fixes. It’s not perfect but it’s very usable. If you’re a fan of MSN for all the ‘nudge’ and ‘wink’ type features then this isn’t for you. If you like the sparse chat style of Gtalk then this is, at the moment Digsby is pretty simple when it comes to chat features.

One great thing about Digsby is that you can chat to people on Facebook Chat through the client, a unique feature for Digsby till a few weeks ago when some other clients began to get it as well. Another great thing about Digsby is the ability to combine contacts different accounts all into one by merging and creating a alias, makes it much easier keeping track of people.It’s also very customizable and you can get various skins and change the layout around to how you like. By creating a Digsby account you can synchronize it across multiple locations and computers and keep all your settings. A very promising application and worth checking out!

AIM Express tries to change that for users of the AOL Instant Messenger. It’s a web service that is offering AIM users a way to send and receive messages without the AIM client. That comes pretty handy if you are at a library or at work and want to send your friends a short message.

The only requirement for AIM Express is Adobe Flash 9.0 that has to be installed on the computer so that the service can be started. All that needs to be done is signing in with the username or email and password and you get access to the AIM Express client that opens in a popup window.

Make sure you don’t block the popup. The client offers a basic functionality, you see all your buddies, may chat with one or several of them, may add new buddies and may change your online status.

It’s a nice web application for everyone who is using AIM and needs access to it on computers that are not his own. Just pray that the system admin did not disable access to either Flash or the AIM Express website.

Update: AIM Express is still available on the official AOL Instant Messenger website. The requirements have changed in the meantime. Users need to have the latest version of Adobe Flash installed to use the service’s functionality. An AIM account is obviously required as well.

The new version can be used to chat with anyone on AIM, Facebook or Google Talk. The full buddy list is accessible, as are options to update Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare and more services right from within the service.

The Pidgin Encryption plugin adds encryption to Pidgin by generating a public and private key during activation. Let me give you a short rundown on that encryption scheme. The public keys are accessible by all of your contacts which can use them to encrypt their messages. The only person who can decrypt those messages is the one with the private key that builds a pair with that public key. It comes down to swapping the public keys so that messages can be encrypted and decrypted on the fly.

Thankfully Pidgin does most of that automatically. There is no need, like in other applications, to transfer the public key on a different way to the other users. The keys are automatically created and the public key is automatically transferred to all contacts. There is however the possibility to exchange the keys using different way to increase the security. Meet your friend at a secret location and hand him the self destructing disk with your public key..

You obviously need Pidgin for that and the Pidgin Encryption Plugin. You can regenerate your key in the preferences and change the default size of 1024 bits to a value between 512 and 4096 bits. Make sure that both “Automatically Encrypt” boxes are checked. A list of the public keys of your buddies is also available in the preferences.

By default the conversations take place unencrypted. A user needs to press the TX button to encrypt the messages. If the user on the other end is not using the plugin he will see a notification that the message is encrypted and that he needs the plugin. If that is the case the TX button will show to be secure while the RX button will be plain. (I guess TX stands for Transmit while RX for Receive)

To always use encryption when chatting with a specific user you need to right-click that user and select Turn Auto-Encrypt On. To avoid man in the middle attacks you need to compare keys with your buddy. This can be done in the Pidgin preferences. I suggest another way of communication to compare the keys. (phone, irc, voip)

A last tip. If you use multiple computers you probably want to make sure that all use the same keys. You can do that by moving the keys from .pidgin directory in *nix or in the application data directory in Windows to the new computer. The keys are stored in the three files:

• id.priv (private keys)
• id (public keys)
• known_keys

Each line of the files represents one key which means that you can also copy only selected keys to the other machine.

Popular web services like Meebo get blocked from school, university and work networks quite frequently and it is always nice to have an ace – Koolim – in your sleeve. Koolim should work even if the computer you are working with is protected by a firewall.

Koolim supports the major Instant Messenger networks: AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk and ICQ plus several lesser known networks such as Jabber, X-Fire and Gadu-Gadu.

Every user has the option to either log into any of the IM networks by entering his username and password or by signing up to Koolim and handling matters from the inside.

Read More:

Koolim Homepage
via: Genbeta

AIM Ad Hack is a free software that interacts with AIM during installation making it possible to remove unneeded or obtrusive features and advertisements from AIM while keeping all the necessary features in place. It removes for instance the advertisements from the main window and the buddy list, blocks and removes AOL Toolbar and Loader and disables the AOL Host Manager from starting up with Windows.

Each option can be checked or unchecked before installation. It is furthermore possible to install several widely known plugins for AIM during installation, to name some: Facebook, Buddy Icon Maker and Text Colors plugins.

You only need to download AIM Ad Hack which downloads AIM during the installation. You can uncheck that as well but this is only advisable if you already have the latest version of AIM installed and want to remove features and tools only. Make sure you download the right version of AIM Ad Hack though because there are several available for download at the developers website.

Update: The official website is not accessible anymore. It is not clear if it will come back at a later point in time, or if the AIM Ad Hack project has been discontinued. Software download portals such as Softpedia host the latest version of the software on their servers. The version will eventually stop working when AOL updates their instant messenger to a new version.

Imo.im offers one more feature that separates it from other websites that let you log into your instant messenger. The so called Group Chat feature lets you invite buddies from all four instant messengers that are currently supported. This way you can chat with everyone even if they do use a different instant messenger. Buddies do not have to sign into Imo.im to use the group chat feature. This would only be necessary if they wanted to invite other users by themselves.

I personally think that Imo.im is already a great alternative to Meebo, especially if Meebo has been banned from your network. This new service is surely to new to be banned as well which makes it an excellent opportunity to use instant messenger services. Imo.im is still a early alpha but already working fine in my opinion.

If you did try Imo.im let me know how you like the service.