i only use emails, i’m not even using my cell phone, not to mention facebook and others. People around me are shocked and confused that they can’t find informations about me in the internet

Thanks for the tip, Luke! Pidgin is actually very neat!

Heh, same here – most of the people I know are on AIM. Few are on GTalk. I currently don’t know anyone who uses MSN. My bother has a YIM account but he uses trillian and so he is also signed into AIM.

Personally I use Pidgin on all my systems. I really like what they did with the most recent version.

Actually, come to think of it, I think I do have a yahoo account – via Flicker. I presume I could use that login to chat on YIM.

[quote post=”1905″]ere are plenty who refuse to use more than one, which creates enclaves[/quote]

Guilty as charged. I currently use YIM and GTalk with Lotus Sametime at work. I used to have AIM until I got seriously spammed. Most people know of my Microsoft hatred, so no point in covering MSN.

The cool thing is that I only use one client for all three. I use pidgeon (formerly GAIM) on my UNIX systems and Adium on my Mac.

The beautiful thing about email is that you don’t have to be on a particular network to talk to someone. Although lots of people do have multiple IM accounts, there are plenty who refuse to use more than one, which creates enclaves.

For conversation or spontaneous planning, IM

For anything with more deliberation, like medium/longer term plans, or contacting a company (for tech support and the like), email

I have once ended up receiving tech support via IM, but I prefer email for the same reason as I prefer email to the phone for such things – you can do other stuff, take a while to reply, go away and try stuff at your own pace and so on

Mine used to be email, but that goes back to the days before all these viruses (virii?) hit main stream. It seams mail is getting slower and slower. With it being a store-n-forward type of service, this is understandable.

IM has taken email’s happy place. Google talk specifically for me since I maintain copies of all my chats in GMail. Kinda the best of both worlds. IM is also immediate. No more calling people asking if my email got through. It is also a great tool to see if a friend is even on line. At one time, I used IRC quite heavily until a bot bashed my system. Jabber has given me the breath of fresh air, but I am sure it is only time before someone writes some kind of malware to attack that.

For me, IM are great only when you need to talk about many things that need the interaction. You know, when your counterpart’s opinion might influence what you’re going to say next.

In my case, particularly, Social Networks are good to keep track of the people I meet around the world. Plus, tools such as Skype are great to talk using VoIP – which is better than simple IM text.

Anyway, e-mail is still the BEST! Specially Gmail and the way it organizes the messages and makes it easy to find them.

By the way, many IM allows you to store the messages offline (you probably knew that, but anyway). So in case of a power outage, your brother would still be able to recover those messages although it wouldn’t be easy to identify who sent something between the time he was away and the power outage.