Instant Messaging…
…is like a pub.
No really, it is, sometimes you log on to lurk, see who pops in for a bit, chat rubbish… sometimes you’re kinda meeting up with someone for a chat (esp. when they’re in a far away country).. sometimes you log in and there’s people trying to talk to you, who you don’t really want to… if it served alcohol… it’d be a pub!
I use a thing called trillian which allows you to have 1 program open, that connects to all the different IM platforms there are, mainly because I have friends on MSN and Yahoo… and partly because I’ve set it to strip out all the fluff that annoys me (big smillies n backgrounds n games…), partly because its more secure and partly because it works better.
One usefull feature that always amuses me is that I can set it to auto-reply to incoming messages, so if I’m away from my desk it’ll reply with “I am currently idle” in case you haven’t seen my status… this makes me laugh because I’ve seen people reply to the auto-replies! “lol, you’re always saying you’re idle” being my favourite so far!
Ahh… technologies great aint it? 😀
This trillian sounds slick, is it available for Mac ? (I’ll fire up a google in a bit actually !)