Pidgin Product Review

Pidgin is a Multi-IM client that supports multiple protocols. Among the list are AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, IRC, MSN, Yahoo!, and much more. In fact, this client even supports chat protocols that I have never even heard of.

I recently switch from the standard AIM client to this because I got sick of the ads at the top of the buddy list window that would play music whenever I would put my cursor over them.

The buddy list window in Pidgin is very simplified. Green circles indicate that the user is available, a little clock indicates that a user is away, and a ghosted clock indicates that the user is idle. You can also see the away message of the user right under their screen name.


The chat window supports tabs so that you could have multiple conversations within the same window. Had this article been written a few years ago, these tabbed chat windows would have been a really big deal. However, tabs have become pretty standard these days.


Pidgin runs on all Windows and UNIX platforms. Pidgin can be downloaded from their site.