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What’s your take on Instant messaging (IM)? Is it Synchronous or Asynchronous?

Synchronous: You treat an IM session like a face-to-face conversation. Take turns and get a response before continuing. Interactive.

Asynchronous: You treat an IM session like an email exchange. Share your thoughts, respond as you can or have time. Or not at all.

Did you try Digsby but drop it when you noticed memory usage in the 50 – 120MB range? I guess I can confess that is exactly what I did… I really liked using Digsby, but that footprint really began to bug me.

Good news: the latest beta seems to have dramatically reduced the memory consumption of this thing. In fact, the top two focuses for this release were memory consumption and performance – and it shows.

Did you try Digsby but drop it when you noticed memory usage in the 50 – 120MB range? I guess I can confess that is exactly what I did… I really liked using Digsby, but that footprint really began to bug me.

Good news: the latest beta seems to have dramatically reduced the memory consumption of this thing. In fact, the top two focuses for this release were memory consumption and performance – and it shows.

Are you a Google Talk user? Have you tried the latest “labs edition” version? Pretty cool, huh? Hey, could I go for four question marks in one paragraph?

In general, the new labs version is pretty slick – the calendar notifications with snooze option have, in particular, been quite popular at the office. Seriously, it rocks.

Many moons ago I tried to use my hosted Google ID (via Google Apps) with meebo and had no success. At the time, I just shrugged and moved on — my regular Google Talk ID was working fine.

Since then, I’ve standardized the office on Google Talk^[1]. I have other IM clients I like and use at work, but sometimes at home it’s nice to be available for work IM. When running Windows I’ve lately been gravitating to Digsby^[2] but when dabbling with Linux I usually fall-back to meebo.

I have digsby up and running on my old Thinkpad 600E running Windows 2000. I wasn’t sure that it would actually run, but after one small adjustment it seems to be running just fine.

The adjustment? I needed to grab and install the GDI+ redistributable package.