Blog@Reginabally.net

Do you use abbreviations while chatting with friends on IM? Or, will you become miserable when someone sends you an abbreviation that you couldn’t understand? Well, this website could help you a lot. With it’s A to Z list, you could hardly miss any.

Live Messenger users can now chat with Yahoo! Messenger users and vice versa. You can sign on to your IM accounts using Meebo, eBuddy and other web-based IM clients. Again, you can use Trillian, Gaim, Miranda etc to chat / IM with most of the IM users. These, are the new innovations for IM and chat clients.

I found this article on digg. The author listed out six new ideas in chat. Here are the summary of it:

1. Interoperability
As I mentioned above, the use of Trillian, Gaim, Miranda etc is the idea of interoperability. This type of approach allows users to communicate across different protocols. So, you can chat with your friends who are using AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, Live Messenger etc.

2. In-Browser Chat
Meebo and eBuddy are using this approach. With in-browser chat capability, users can sign on to their IM accounts wherever they go without installing any software especially if they’re using public computers.

3. Location Based Chat
For this point, I think the only benefit would be finding friends that are located at the same location as you are.

4. Flexible Identities
You can have a few identities while chatting with different types of users.

5. Contextual Chat
You can embed some chat widgets on your blog’s sidebar so that your visitors can chat with you when you’re online.

6. Rich Media Chat
For services like Skype, you can chat with your friends using webcam and microphones. Other than that, you can even make calls to local phone numbers and mobile phone numbers. Of course, some of the services needs money.

Trillian Astra is under construction. This application allows users to chat in Yahoo!, ICQ, AIM, Windows Live (formerly known as MSN), Google Talk and more!

With the new features, especially for memory usage reduction I think this is another good alternatives. I’m currently using WIndows Live Messenger 8.0 which consumes me around 16MB of memory usage. But Trillian Astra claims that the memory usage is only around 5MB. If you use the barebone skin, memory usage would be less than 5MB.

Other than that, the loading time for Trillian Astra is faster compared to previous version. File sharing is also easier because Trillian Astra enables users to select up to 5 files for simultaneous drag and drop file transfer and then Trillian Astra will automatically zip them before sending out.
There are lots of new features which I can’t write down here. If you wish to know more, please visit the website for Trillian Astra.