By Peggy Pulliam, Tampa PC Users Group
pegrance@yahoo.com

At the September meeting, Kevan Sheridan presented a way to consolidate Instant Messaging. Instant Messaging (IM) is a way of talking with someone else on the web by typing a message and sending it immediately while the other person is right there to see it at the moment and answer you back.

Businesses find this works in the customer service section when a caller asks a question that the service rep doesn’t have the answer to, but his buddy in the office does. Since they are on the web at the same time, they IM the associate and get the answer, and the caller never has to know who had the actual answer. People like it because they can get an answer fast or send a message right now.

Connect to MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ and IRC, and most of the time to AOL® Instant Messenger (AIM) in a single interface. What we saw was a way to coordinate all of them through “Trillian”. Each person you have entered the name of is shown in your “buddy list”, and you can see if they are online, if they have actually done something recently, or might have stepped away from the computer. They can be on any of the six services mentioned and still be managed through Trillian. So you don’t have to have your AIM box open and your MSN box open and your Yahoo box open. From that one place, you can talk to any of your buddies if they are available and if there are two or more you can get to an area where the group of you can all IM in the same screen! You cannot, however, chat with someone on one of the systems if you don’t have an account on that system set up for instant messaging.

You can block people from seeing that you are online, in case there’s someone you don’t want sending you messages, or you want to plan a secret party. You can block the whole list from seeing that you are online and do your research without being interrupted by someone sending an IM. You can make the window transparent so it doesn’t completely block out the things underneath it on your screen, you can set different sounds, change the look of the box on your desktop, send pictures or links for web sites, and other fancy things, too, that Kevan didn’t have time to show us. One other thing he did show is the log feature where your IM words are recorded and saved on your computer. This will help when someone types “Jo’s phone number is 555-5555” and you go on chatting and close the IM windows and forgot to note it down.

This will speed and open up communication a lot! Best of all, it is completely free in the version we saw and without ads too! Http://www.trillian.cc will get you there if you want to try it out. u