If you don’t want to read my boring testimonial, here’s the link for your convenience: IM-History – “All-in-one IM-History Client Suite”.

I use IM a lot and I have logging turned on. I’m a packrat and this includes my files, email and text messages. The oldest conversation I have in my log is dated December 8, 2005. IM also comes in useful for really small bits of information that I instantly need/give (they don’t call it instant for nothing, you know). My definition of instant messaging is something faster than firing up an email client, thinking of a short descriptive subject line, typing your short message and hitting send.

As mentioned in this blog, I use Linux primarily and Windows when I have to (on the same machine). I use Yahoo! IM and MSN/Windows Live. Yahoo! IM’s logs are in binary. I didn’t bother checking out MSN/Windows Live. On some occasions, I have to stop all my work, close all the windows I have open and reboot to Windows just to see that tiny bit of information. If it’s not important enough, it gets pushed back a week later when I restart my laptop.

Now that my desktop is revived, I use it to log onto my messengers. That makes three machines with different logs. Thanks to IM-History, all logged IM conversations that I have is on one source and available online. I am a bit worried about that last part though. I didn’t check if the data was encrypted and I didn’t read the privacy policy (oh noes!!!). The fact that their logo resembles the Windows logo slightly gives me the chills already.

They support almost everything that I use Skype, Yahoo! IM and MSN/Windows Live on Windows and Pidgin on Linux (didn’t see GTalk/Jabber on their list). To install the Linux Pidgin client, download the script, make it executable then run it. Just to be sure, log out of your current session and log on again. If it doesn’t work and you’re using Gnome, make sure you have Qt installed.

Props to Lifehacker for sharing this.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 04.02 and is filed under Software/Code, Techitude, The Web/Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.