I wrote the other day about the iPhone version of AIM, and how it takes advantage of push notifications in iPhone 3.0., but since then I've been testing a different chat client that really takes things to the next level: BeejiveIM. You might be put off by the $10 purchase price, but if you're an avid IM fanatic, it will be worth every penny. BeejiveIM supports AIM, Google Chat, MSN, Yahoo!, Facebook and MySpace in a smart layout that makes it the most usable chat app I've tried on the iPhone yet.

The key features that make BeejiveIM a killer app are its support for push notifications, its horizontal keyboard, and the elegant way it organizes open chats. Rather than forcing you to dig through submenus on your buddy list, BeejiveIM puts the buddy list on one screen, and a list of your open chats on another. If someone IMs you while you have a chat open, you can tap once on the number of unread messages to switch between chats. This is right in so many ways, and avoids the clunky feeling of having to go back to your buddy list to switch to another conversation.

Sure, $10 is on the high end of the App Store price range, but there's nothing going that beats BeejiveIM at what it does. It's replaced both the AIM app and the Meebo web app on my home screen.

My favorite chat client for OS X just keeps getting better. Adium 1.3.4. has been released, and it offers some major performance improvements, especially where Facebook Chat is concerned. It's also likely the last Adium release that will work on OS X 10.4 Tiger. As nice as it is to get stable updates to Adium, 1.3.4 is overshadowed by the release of 1.4 beta, which includes support for Twitter and IRC.

1.4b also has a ton of other improvements and fixes, especially in the area of group chats, including the ability to use separate styles for individual and group message windows. Why do group chats matter so much? Well, for one thing, Twitter for Adium runs in a group chat window, so the devs likely had to get that part of the interface running smoothly to roll out Twitter support. The impressive full list of changes and a download of the latest beta can be found at beta.adium.im.

Adium, the popular multi-protocol chat app for OS X, announced a while back that version 1.4 will support using Twitter via IM. If you don't want to wait for 1.4, you can turn on Twitter in Adium using the TwitterIM plugin. It lets you add your Twitter account to Adium, just like an account from any other service, and you can use it to post to Twitter and reply to other people's messages.

TwitterIM is not an official release by the Adium team, but it works well enough to hold you over until theirs comes out. Basically, your Twitter stream comes in like regular IMs, all in one window, and you can click a link to send a reply. To set up Twitter once the plug-in is installed, just create a new account in your Adium preferences, and put in your Twitter username and password.

Meeting24.tv is a great idea in theory. It's sort of a Yahoo! Live-style video chat (remember Yahoo! Live?), where you can have up to 24 people in a meeting at once. There's a big upside to the service: it's free, it's easy to use, and it doesn't require signup for anyone but the host of the meeting. The downside is that you might run into major lag. When I tested the service, each user's audio and video was lagging by several seconds.

A free account comes with the ability to host a meeting room for 24 hours at a time. The time limit is basically irrelevant, because the number of rooms you can start isn't limited, so you can get around it by starting over. I'm not sure I'd use Meeting24.tv for an actual meeting, as the ability to throw illustrated heart icons at other people is a bit unprofessional.

What a joy to see the two apps I have open all day coming together! I'm an IM and Twitter junkie, and Twitter hasn't had IM support in some time. Fortunately, the developers behind my IM client of choice, Adium, are working to put together their own version of a Twitter IM service.

Your Twitter contacts would show up in your Adium list, and you can follow, unfollow and presumably group them from there. Opening a new chat will allow you to exchange direct messages. Displaying your timeline will be handled through Adium's existing group chat interface, with @replies to you highlighted. All in all, this looks like a promising project to restore a Twitter feature that a lot of people found useful. Now, if only they could figure out how to bring back tracking ...

[via TUAW]

AIM Blast is a new AOL Instant Messenger feature that makes me feel old, because I just realized that it's been a decade since I first wondered why there was no way to IM multiple buddies without opening a chatroom. Well, it's finally here, and it works pretty well. You can't make a Blast Group from within AIM, but if you go to blast.aim.com, you can set up and edit a group from there. Blast seems to work with third-party AIM clients, although AOL says that Meebo may have some problems with it.

The Blast Group will then show up on your buddy list, and any IM you send to it will go to everyone in the group. The group acts like a normal AIM account, it just puts people's individual screennames in front of their messages, so you know who's talking. When you invite people (using your group admin page), they'll get a message in AIM asking them to accept or decline. Once they're in, they can IM the group, unless you make it admin-only. That makes your group more like a notification system than a chat, but that may work better for some people.

Not that we were huge fans of Lively to begin with, but I'm sure someone out there loved it. Right? No? Perhaps that explains Google's announcement that, "despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we've decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year." So grab those screenies before 2009 and your avatars and rooms go dead.

One or two of you may cry out in anguish as a few million vertices are silenced with the click of a mouse: "why Google, why?" Well, I'm sure it wasn't the fact that it was PC-only (and Firefox or IE7-only). Or that it wasn't the most stable thing Google has produced. Or that it was, ya know, like Second Life Lite but for chat. Because, clearly, the world needs a few zillion more Second Life-style chat clients, right?

If you are to believe Google, it's because they want to focus on their core business. You know, search and ads and apps that don't look like Animal Crossing. Besides, they can always roll this into Sketchup, so you could have a virtual barn raising. We can dream, can't we?

On Sunday, Business Week published an article stating "It's the end of instant messaging as we know it." In columnist Douglas MacMillan's mind, integrated chat features on sites like Facebook and GMail have signed the death warrant.

Oh really? That's kind of interesting, because there's a lot of evidence that IM is alive and kicking.

Taking a quick look at some stats on Download.com, I notice that these apps still seem to be pretty damn popular. Pidgin has more than half a million downloads to date. Since Trillian was added to the site, it's been downloaded almost 37 million times.

The latest release of Live Messenger 14 is well over 400,000 in just two months - and these numbers don't take into account the numerous other mirrors for these (and numerous other IM) apps.

I absolutely love the popular Mac multi-chat app Adium. Not only does it support a large number of messaging protocols -- including Facebook Chat in the latest version -- it's insanely customizable. In Adium, you can change the look of everything from your contact list to your message style to your dock icon. There's an extensive library of user-created styles at AdiumXtras.com, but they're not all good.

Recently, I went on a bit of a downloading tear, rummaging through the Adium Xtra trash to discover the Adium Xtra treasure. Here, I present my findings: 8 of the slickest, most beautiful add-ons ever to grace a chat client. To check out the full range of Adium Xtras for yourself, go to adiumxtras.com.

Message Style: Cinematic

Cinematic is a smooth, dark style that fits in really well with OS X. It sports Apple's signature "reflection" effect, and uses buddy icons to show who's talking -- no text necessary. I like an uncluttered feeling when I'm chatting, and Cinematic delivers. Match it up with a darker buddy list style and wallpaper for a really put-together desktop.

CBS has launched a new online video service that lets you watch live video streams while chatting with other users at the same time. The service is part of CBS Labs, the experimental arm of the CBS web site.

While watching a program you can type into a comment box to interact with other users, answer quizzes, or be obnoxious and throw virtual items including darts, hearts, and lips at the screen. Messages disappear from the screen pretty quickly, which helps keep the display from getting to cluttered. But you can click a history box to review older comments if you have a hard time keeping up.

If the whole idea sounds familiar, that's because Lycos rolled out a similar service a few months back. The Lycos Cinema player actually offers a better interface with a more traditional chat window that stays on the screen while you're typing or hovering your mouse, but disappears when you're not using it. And you can start playing Lycos movies whenever you like instead of sitting in on live streams. But Lycos Cinema's content library is populated by obscure titles and lacks mainstream fare like How I Met Your Mother.

[via TechCrunch]

There's a new version of the free Windows chat/social messaging client Digsby today. Probably the biggest change in this release is a dramatic reduction in memory use. Like a 75% reduction.

One of the biggest complaints early Digsby users had was that the application was a memory hog. And while it still certainly uses a bit more memory than some IM clients, that's to be expected since Digsby isn't just an IM client. The program also provides email notifications and updates from social networking sites including MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

The latest release also adds LinkedIn support. Once you register your LinkedIn account you'll be able to see the number of unattended alerts at a glance by looking at the icon in your system tray. You can also click on the icon to see the latest updates from your LinkedIn contacts.

There have also been some performance updates that should make the program more responsive. And each IM protocol will try several connection methods for getting around firewalls and proxy servers before giving up.

If you've been avoiding Digsby because of its high memory footprint, it might be time to give it another look. In my tests, I've found that it uses between 25MB and 40MB of memory. Now if only the Digsby team would hurry up and release Mac and Linux versions they've been promising.

If you haven't checked it out yet, the Windows Live Messenger 2009 Beta is now available for download.

Yes, it's the same horrid installer. It has obviously undergone some changes, though, and isn't quite as bad as the previous version. My apps downloaded and installed on the first try, a stark contrast to my numerous failures with the last Live Installer.

Live Messenger's UI has received a lot of attention, including a much improved chat window. Display pictures and the chat toolbar slide in and out of view, and the conversation styling is clean and readable. I'd like to see tabbed conversation windows, but there's still no sign of that.

Microblogging options abound, most with drippy sounding names and many with half-baked functionality, having only been thrown together because Twitter was down again due to some kind of malfunction with the staffroom espresso machine. Rejaw, on the other hand, offers users a solid alternative with a number of excellent features. Without whales.

The basic idea's pretty much the same: shout and post something on your main profile page, whisper to send a private message to someone. nothing really special here yet, but bear with me.

Shouts, whispers, and replies are posted to the Rejaw servers almost instantly, so what you actually get is a more like an IRC/microblogging mashup than just another Twitter wannabe. The interface is nicely Ajaxed, and extremely responsive. Keep an eye on the status overlay at the bottom of your browser window, it'll let you know when new shouts and whispers are posted.

One of the most striking things about the first crop of iPhone apps is the divide between those that work with the phone's user interface, and those that either don't take advantage of the phone or ignore the design specs altogether. The AOL Instant Messenger app for iPhone scores points in some UI areas, but could be more intuitive and feel more like an iPhone app in others.

We've got no complaints about the look of AIM, but there are some places where it doesn't feel right. For example, we were really hoping for a horizontal mode in this app, to take advantage of the wider keyboard. Groups are supported, but you can only view them one at a time, which makes them much less useful than on desktop versions of AIM. While a mobile AIM app like this is a dream we've had since high school, we favor the more intuitive Meebo mobile web app. It supports mutliple chat clients, too ... can we get an app store version of that?

Oh, and here's a tip, because we've seen a lot of people confused by this: to change your screenname, you have to go to your iPhone Settings. It's not in the AIM app itself.

What could be more fun than browsing your favorite sites? Why, browsing your favorite sites while directing a funky-looking avatar to parade around and do your bidding, of course. Unlike PMOG, where your experience is backgrounded until you stumble upon mines or loot (but requires a Firefox extension to work), RocketOn figures it'll be a lot more fun to disrupt your browsing with some crudely animated avatars overlaid on top of whatever page you're on. They do this in much the same way Gabbly works, by intercepting the page and overlaying the content on top. Essentially, you're seeing a browser in a browser.

We weren't particularly impressed with RocketOn, however. While the tech works well enough, is there really a desire to put an avatar on pages? It completely interrupts the experience and adds practically nothing that you can't get from a service like Gabbly, save the rather lame avatars. The avatars themselves aren't very customizable out of the box, although apparently you're supposed to hang out on the bare pages of RocketOn to "earn" more stuff. Pets, clothes, the usual crap you get thrown at you on Facebook. Ultimately this looks like a nice tech demo that is just a complete waste of time. Or maybe we're missing the point.

[via TechCrunch]