It really bothers me that so many people use AOL Instant Messenger when it's really not that great of a messaging program. Yahoo! Messenger is far superior in virtually every aspect - and that's not my opinion, it's pretty much a fact: -Invisible Mode vs. Away Message. While Yahoo! has Away message capacity, it's really pointless. But, if you're logged on with AIM and you don't want to talk to certain people who have you in their buddy list, the only polite way of approaching the situation is to put up an away message. That way if they send an IM, you don't necessarily have to respond to it. Problem is, if there's someone online that you want to talk to (and no one else, perhaps) you have to surrender your away status and get bombarded with IMs from people whom you weren't interested in talking to at that moment. Well, Yahoo has that covered much more efficiently. Instead of having to show up as "Online" to other people as soon as you log on, you have the option of getting on as "Invisible." This means that you don't show up as "Online" in anyone else's buddy list. You can talk to who you want to talk to (and they can be invisible too) and not worry about getting bombarded. Another advantage to this is that all the stupid bots you get with AIM that necessitate the "Warn" button can't see you listed as online, and therefore do not hassle you. -Offline Messages.You log on to AIM and you have to stay online while you're gone in order to continue receiving messages. If you log off, there's no way for a person to send you a message. So you pretty much have to have the crap-ass program running at all times if you want to be certain that nobody fails to pass on information to you or whatever. That's when the away message comes into play most. I won't even get into the whole stupid auto-response thing. Contrarily, Yahoo! will let you log off, turn off your computer, unplug it, throw it out the window, get your dog to urinate on it, take it to the PC repairman and have it fixed, reinstall the Y!M program and still relay to you all the messages that were sent to your screenname since the last time you were logged on. I could keep going, but I'm pretty tired of writing at this point. Speaking of points though, mine is this: I don't want to install this crappy program on my computer, but I end up doing it because I have to in order to contact a good chunk of my friends. And the thing is, most people have Yahoo! Messenger, but just don't bother to use it. Why in the hell would you opt for AIM when you don't have to? Just use Yahoo, tell all your buddies to contact you through that program, keep AIM in away mode with a message informing folks to contact you on Yahoo. If everyone did that, it might finally kill the whole AIM thing. That's what I'm doing. Who's coming with me? Viva la revolucion. Viva el mensaje de Yahoo! Muerte a America!(online)
I'm sure people use AIM messenger because it has been around for the longest (I believe). And as for alternatives, I go with ICQ. It has all the features you described for Yahoo Messenger as well.
By the way, the two guys who made Trillian are pretty cool, two really young guys who made an awesome program and I hope they will greatly benefit from it commercially in the future. Had many beers with them.
I use Trillian but, for some reason, my Yahoo! contacts don't show up -- even when I know they're online. I've tried reconnecting, but it doesn't help. Ideas would be greatly appreciated. But, yeah, DallasThomas, I'm with you: AIM sucks.
Buy Trillian Pro . No, seriously, if you get the newest version of Trillian, it should work. Sometimes you have to click on the little Yahoo icon and reconnect manually, I don't know why. Which skin do you guys use? I use the Modified Trillian Cordillera 0.71 Twiggy skin, it's great, I think.
Upon recommendation, I downloaded and cracked Pro just now (just to try it out). It didn't work with my Yahoo either and there's still no way of logging on under invisible mode. Trillian, while cool in that it consolidates things, is not much different than AIM or MSN Messenger...I mean, the whole not having offline messages and lacking invisible mode thing. I also have all the plugins, but I didn't bother installing them all. Are there any that would allow me to function under invisible mode on AIM/MSN or receive offline messages from any of these services? It didn't appear that there were any, so I just uninstalled. But if there are, I'd like to know from an experienced user.
See, the downside of the integrated clients is that (a) they often don't contain all of the features of the network they're connecting to, and (b) are constantly fighting a battle with the networks they connect to. I believe that both MSN and Yahoo! have changed their protocols multiple times, partly in order to break the third-party clients. By the way, I agree with Dallas Thomas. Video and audio, offline messages, invisible mode and the such like all make Yahoo! superior to AIM. I use Yahoo Messenger and Adium (which consolidates all the others) on my PowerBook. Any extended functionality I want is covered by the official Yahoo client, and I can stay in touch with everyone else using Adium.
Because most of the people in my industry use it, therefore it provides me a competitive advantage over those who only use their phone to trade.
People use AIM becasue it has one of the largest user group, what's good about an IM if none of your friend is using it? AIM were one of the first IM, it started almost at the same time as ICQ, but with the complexity and the not-so-user-freindly interface of ICQ, AIM become more and more popular. Now with MSN and Yahoo having their IM with more features and better GUI, it just matter of times when all AIM user shift to MSN or Yahoo if AOL won't make any major changes in their product, but it's going to take some times.
I think I remember I already used telnet on bayou.uh.edu to chat...anyone else? Next was a little program called "Wintalk"...before ICQ came up...but I doubt anyone here used that...
