It seems that Google and Yahoo are suddenly bosom buddies at the moment. Not only are Yahoo outsourcing some of their search advertising to Google at the moment but they are also talking about opening up their instant messaging network to Google Talk :

“Yahoo! and Google agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant messaging services bringing easier and broader communication to users.”

This is very good news but my main concern about Yahoo Messenger is that a LOT of spam comes through Yahoo Messenger. So much so that I need to have Bot Sentry installed on Pidgin just to keep my Yahoo Messenger ID going. If I were to move Yahoo Messenger over to my Google Talk client, they would need to assure me that they had stringent spam protection procedures in place to stop all the stupid bots interrupting me every 5 minutes.

It always amazes me how most of the IM spam seems to be concentrated on Yahoo Messenger more than any other IM network!

Technorati Tags: bot sentry, chat, Google, IM, messenger, pidgin, spam, Yahoo

photo credit: stingerdl

A while earlier, I did what I should have done ages ago. I cleaned up my Pidgin contact list - which was a big deal for me because I had over 75 people on it and I knocked it down to around 40. It made me realise how easy it is to accumulate contacts and how important it is to prune these contact lists on a regular basis, especially if you use a multi-protocol client such as Pidgin or Trillian - more networks, more contacts, more clutter.

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Technorati Tags: chat, IM, pidgin, Productivity, Tips

Just one more thing about Pidgin before I move onto other subjects for a while. I really like the buddy pounce feature where you can be notified when someone comes back online again. Unlike normal notification systems on IM programs, this buddy pounce program is tailor-made for one specific contact only and ignores everyone else. Which is perfect if you are waiting for a specific person to make an appearance online and you don’t want to sit there all day staring at your computer screen, drumming your fingers impatiently, muttering “come on, come on….”

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Technorati Tags: buddy, chat, hack, IM, pidgin, pounce, Productivity, Tips

I am totally obsessed right now with Pidgin. I like how I can integrate Skype into it, in fact I like full stop how extensible the whole thing is. You can skin it, you can add plug-ins, you can make it whatever way you want it. Due to its open-source nature, there’s an active developer community and I am talking to a couple of people at the moment via email and IM about their Pidgin development projects (you can see one of them here).

You see, to me, this is the exciting side of the web - the side that opens up to user participation and innovation. Web companies that don’t offer API’s and developer support are just shooting themselves in the foot basically, because what really drives a product are the users. If there is genuine passion among the users, and innovation with third party addons then you’re going to build a loyal customer base - period. If you shut out the developers and discourage innovation then you’re not really inspiring loyalty are you?

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Technorati Tags: bot sentry, chat, developer, hotkeys, IM, Make Use Of, open source, pidgin, plugins, shortcuts, Software, spam

A fantastic tool that I blogged about on Make Use Of. Bot Sentry stops instant messaging spam by making the messenger answer a simple question first.

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