Progressive Wednesday

“i’m” making a difference (with Bill Gates’ money)

As you probably know by now, we’re not big fans of Microsoft and their monopolistic, competition-smothering business practices. But, as we've said a few times before, Mr. Gates and his wife are rather altruistic when it comes to social responsibility. So if you just can't yet bring yourself to put free, open source zeros and ones into your collection of binary code, and you use Windows Live Messenger as your chatting software, you can still make a little social progress.Live Messenger is starting a new initiative that makes a donation to a progressive cause every time you CTC with your BFF (care to chat with your best friend forever). Here it is in their own words:

Every time you start a conversation using i'm, Microsoft shares a portion of the program’s advertising revenue with some of the world’s most effective organizations dedicated to social causes. We’ve set no cap on the amount we’ll donate to each organization. The sky’s the limit.

Which organizations are involved? Glad you asked.

1. The American Red Cross
2. Boys and Girls Clubs of America
3. The Humane Society of the United States
4. The National AIDS Fund
5. The National Multiple Sclerosis Society
6. Ninemillion.org
7. Sierra Club
8. StopGlobalWarming.org
9. Susan G. Komen for the Cure
10. U.S. fund for UNICEF

All you have to do is decide which cause you want to support, then plug the text code that corresponds to that organization in the “display name– field. There are more complete instructions here.

It'll take 30 seconds. So check it out, plug in the code, and start spending Microsoft's money to save the world.

How to Chat Progressively

Problem:

You’re a chatter. You chat online. You chit-chat, even. You chitty-chatty chit-chat. Sorry — you get the idea. You’ve got, let’s say, an AIM account and Yahoo Messenger account, but some of your pals are on IRC, MSN Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, and Google Talk. What’s a chatter to do?

Yahoo Messenger members can now connect with MSN Messenger folks, and vice versa, of course. But some of your buds are left out. You can always get accounts with the other services, and open all the necessary chat programs. Let’s say you were just going to talk to folks on Yahoo, MSN Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, and AIM. You’d need to at least be running two of the three programs. Lets say you decide to run Windows and AIM. Windows Live requires at least 128 megs of RAM to run, but prefers 256. AIM gobbles up at least another 128 of RAM.

Most average computer owners can’t really devote 384 megs of RAM to chat software when they, I don’t know, probably have other things to run, you know, not-so-little things like system software and maybe a web browser and a word processor.

(The corporate IM clients also include advertisements for other products. If nothing else, those clients also function as free advertising for the company providing the service: the chat client is an ad for their other services.)

So you could either up your RAM or not communicate with your pals or you could always…

.

Make Progress:

Part of making progress is reducing hassle in your life, particularly when you help other folks out in the process. So, allow us to introduce you to Trillian, a chat client that supports MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, IRC, and of course AIM. In other words, you can chat it up across all the major platforms with one program– ”one program, we ought to add, that only requires 64 megs of RAM.

This sucker has other benefits for chat-a-holics:

• chat with audio
• the ability to transfer files
• a history of your chats
• status changes across all platforms
• Wikipedia look-up within the chat
• no viruses, spy-ware, banner ads, or pop-ups within or because of the software

Need more convincing to give it a whirl? Here’s another perk: Trillian is owned by Connecticut-based Cerulean Studios (an LLC like us!) with a small paid staff.

If you plunk down a measly 25 bucks, you can purchase the pro-version for one year and get:

• video chat across the major platforms
• a range of video chat features
• advanced chat history
• priority support (though I’ve never had a glitch with the basic that I couldn’t resolve myself)
• plug-ins galore

Trillian, basic and pro, is closed source, but c’mon– ”it kicks butt and takes names, and it’s owned by a small business trying to stay afloat. The only hitch with Trillian is this: it’s only good on computers running Windows. But cut Cerulean Studios some slack Mac users. They’re a newish company (they were founded in 1998) lending a digital hand to the vast majority of computer users and they only have a staff of nine (count ‘em, nine).

Mac users, you already have a pretty good chat client (like you need us to tell you) which has the kind of inventive Apple nomenclature we’ve come to know and love: iChat. But Apple is a big-wig business, and if you’re wanting to go with something else, we recommend Adium. Adium, an open-source chat client for Macs, supports AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, iChat, Google Talk, and others. You can also transfer files. On the downside, there’s no audio or video chat supported. You could also go with Fire, which has all the basics (sans audio and video chat).

So chat, people, and avoid advertising and help out the little gals and guys.

Photo by this chatter.