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.

Google Talk is not only used by individuals who want to chat with their family, friends and relatives but also by businesses who use it to communicate with customers and for internal support. One of the problems that users do experience is that there is not a way to let the user initiating the communication know that they are not available at that time.

Enter Google Talk Autoreply; A lightweight Open-Source computer program that can be used to configure auto-replies that notify the Google Talk user that the person is currently not in the place to answer.

The message that is automatically posted whenever the Google Talk Autoreply client is running can be configured individually. This message is then send to users who try to contact the user running Google Talk Autoreply.

Security conscious users might want to analyze the source code as a Google account username and password have to be supplied. Google Talk Autoreply is available at the project’s homepage at Codeplex.

One option is offered by Dexrex, a company that is providing the means to backup these messages and SMS online. Support are a wide variety of clients and networks including Skype, Windows Live, AOL, Yahoo, Jabber, ICQ, Blackberry and Google Talk. It is possible to sign in with the network accounts at the Dexrex website to initiate the backup of the data. Some users might be concerned about security and privacy.

There is obviously always a risk when entering data in third party websites. Dexrex uses the https protocol to transfer data between the client computer and the server. Backups can either be started using the Conversation Importer, a Java program that can import old conversations, or so called Extensions which run in the background and import messages in realtime.

The conversations are available online after transferring them to the server. It is for example possible to search the conversations, use filters to filter by contact or date or to share conversations with trusted users. It is even possible to edit conversations online. SMS archiving is currently only supported for Blackberry cell phones. Users need to download an application to their Blackberry to backup the SMS.

Dexrex provides an easy way of backing up conversations and SMS from Blackberry devices. It can be a a useful services for users who work with multiple computer systems and messengers.

Here is a great tip on how to add Google Talk contacts as shortcuts to the Windows desktop. This makes it possible to quickly reach a bunch of important Google Talk contacts faster and more comfortably. It should also work to integrate those contacts with application launchers like Launchy to make it even more comfortable.

To add a contact in Google Talk as a shortcut do the following. Right-click the computer desktop and select New > Shortcut. Enter the following string as the location of the item: gtalk:chat?jid=<name>@email.com.

Change username@email.com to the email address of the contact in Google Talk. Click on the Next button and add a descriptive name for the shortcut. If everything worked out well clicking on the shortcut will open the chat window with that contact in Google Talk immediately even if Google Talk is not running at that time. It will launch Google Talk and display the chat window after the login procedure in this case.

Update: You can also replace chat with call to be able to instantly call someone in Google Talk.

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.

Gabtastik is a WebKit based Site Specific Browser (SSB) for web chat services currently in Beta that runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X 10.4 or later computers. The Adobe Flash Player is the only other requirement besides an account at Facebook and / or Google Mail.

The beta version does not offered a lot of add-ons over the original chat applications on the websites. We already covered performance and the only two additional features are transparency which can be set in the desktop client and the ability to quickly switch between both chats. But that is more or less also provided in modern browsers where users can simply switch between tabs to do the same.

Interestingly enough the Mac client of Gabtastic in version 0.20 is supporting meebo as well providing access to several Instant Messengers like AIM, MSN and Yahoo while the Windows 0.21 version does not support these yet. The creators definitely have to add more value to the application to make it a must have alternative.

I’m not talking about business meetings where translators make sure everything is translated as it should be.Google Talk offers a solution if you want to chat with someone whose language you do not speak. The solution is a translation bot that translates what you type into another language.

The quality of the translation looks similar to that of Google Translate which means that the translated sentences will not have perfect grammar and sometimes words that are out of context. Most of the time though the native speaker will understand what you wanted to say.

Bots are invited as friends in Google Talk and then added to a group chat where they translate messages that you type. The email for the bots depends on a two letter country code, currently 24 bots are available:

Arabci > English (ar2en)
German > English (de2en)
German > French (de2fr)
Greek > English (el2en)
English > Arabic (en2ar)
English > German (en2de)
English > Greek (en2el)
English > Spanish (en2es)
English > French(en2fr)
English > Italian (en2it)
English > Japanese (en2ja)
English > Korean (en2ko)
English > Dutch (en2nl)
English > Russian (en2ru)
English > Chinese (en2zh)
Spanish > English (es2en)
French > German (fr2de)
French > English (fr2en)
Italian > English (it2en)
Japanese > English (ja2en)
Korean > English (ko2en)
Dutch > English(nl2en)
Russian > English (ru2en)
Chinese > English(zh2en)

The full email of the bot that you want to invite depends on the 5 char code and is followed by @bot.talk.google.com. If you want to invite the English to Chinese bot you invite en2zh@bot.talk.google.com for instance.

Eight Instant Messaging networks are currently mentioned on the Instantbird homepage, those are: AIM, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, ICQ, MSN, QQ, XMPP and Yahoo!. Several others are however available as well if you want to add a new network. It runs pretty solid for such an early version though and it will be interesting to see how this project evolves in the future.

The roadmap looks promising and is outlined at the developers website of Instandbird. Localization, smiley and sound themes are for instance scheduled for version 0.2 of the client. It will take some time but if the developers manage to put the same effort and dedication into this project than the other teams are putting into developing Firefox, Thunderbird and Songbird they will surely create a remarkable software.

Instantbird is Open Source and available for Microsoft Windows, Linux and Apple Macintosh.

Read More:

Instantbird Homepage
via Download Squad

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

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.