Recently in Chat Category

You can now chat from within the gmail interface (so no need to open another program) - or at least you can if your contacts also have had this feature enabled in their gmail account. My first gmail account has had this option enabled but my main google account that I use on a day to day basis (as it contains all helsby.net emails) does not have it activated yet. The strange thing is that you can initiate a chat invite from a working account (and I was hoping that would activate my secondary account for chatting) but the secondary account does not receive the invite in the mail box - I'm guessing it probably goes to the chat client - if it has been downloaded.
It will be interesting to see how this progresses. At the moment I'm guessing it is text only IM similar to the web interfaces to MSN and ICQ.
In related news I've been setting up a Live Communication Server for a client and the Communicator program looks pretty good. The annoying thing is that I can't see any documentation on how to get hold of the non-trial version of the client - it apparently is free with licences for the server so you would expect to get the media for the client with the server - but nooooooo.......

I've now got a headset and microphone so I can use skype properly. Username is ahelsby. I'm not sure how often I'll be using it at the moment as its a bit obvious when you talk into a microphone but don't have the phone to your ear!

I was aware of ICQ-GO (previously called icq-lite but today I came across MSN Web Messenger. Both of these are official web interfaces to the prospective chat programs. So if you are behind a firewall that blocks the chat protocols.......

Some swine has recently managed to nick my icq number, 910466, and register it for himself in the past couple of weeks. I've no idea how he managed to do it, although I think it might have been because my email address was set to a bigfoot address which I no longer use (and could possibly have been taken over by the "hacker").
So I've had to register a new number which is about 25 digits long and a lot harder to memorise. So if you had my old icq number then you need to contact me and get the new one.

Miranda Instant Messenger 0.3.2 is now available.

I'm sure I posted about a new alternative to icq or trillian called Miranda but a quick search shows I haven't. This is a pretty useful chat program, which is free (a good start), and comes with almost no functionality to start with. Once you've downloaded the main program you then download the plugins that you require, so if you don't chat to yahoo users, then you don't need to download the yahoo plugin. So far I'm very impressed with it, although i've not got the net send functionality to work on the lan yet but I think that might be the firewall getting in the way.