Gaim is Pidgin Now!

Due to previous legal issues with AOL regarding naming conventions, Gaim version 2.0 remained frozen in beta stages. After a legal consensus was reached between AOL and the Pidgin developers, on Fri, May 4, 2007 – 07:04 pm the developer of Gaim announced Pidgin as a new name for Gaim. In addition to the new name, this release features extraordinary enhancements to features and functionality over the previous release. You can get it from the download page.

What is Pidgin?
Pidgin is an instant messaging program for Windows, Linux, BSD, and other Unixes. Looking for Pidgin for OS X? Try Adium! You can talk to your friends using AIM, ICQ, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, and Zephyr.

Pidgin can log in to multiple accounts on multiple IM networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on AIM, talking to a friend on Yahoo Messenger, and sitting in an IRC channel all at the same time.

Pidgin supports many features of the various networks, such as file transfer, away messages, and typing notification. It also goes beyond that and provides many unique features. A few popular features are Buddy Pounces, which give the ability to notify you, send a message, play a sound, or run a program when a specific buddy goes away, signs online, or returns from idle; and plugins, consisting of text replacement, a buddy ticker, extended message notification, iconify on away, spell checking, tabbed conversations, and more.

Pidgin integrates well with GNOME 2 and KDE 3.1’s system tray, as well as Windows’s own system tray. This allows you to work with Pidgin without requiring the buddy list window to be open at all times.

Pidgin is under constant development, and releases are usually frequent. The latest news regarding Pidgin can be found on the news page.

Don’t have a GUI desktop?
Try Finch! Finch is the text-based version of Pidgin. It supports the same IM networks, but you can run it in a console window. You can use it on Linux, BSD, and other Unixes.