Pidgin is a chat program which lets you log in to accounts on multiple chat networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on MSN, talking to a friend on Google Talk, and sitting in a Yahoo chat room all at the same time. New release includes a ton of bug fixes, some new features, and a fix for a security issue.

With the integration of the Telepathy framework into GNOME, most distributions are dropping the old instant messaging favorite Pidgin, for the new upstream application Empathy.

Pidgin is a multi-featured instant messaging desktop client that is very popular among Linux users. It supports a wide range of chat networks like Yahoo!, AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, and IRC. You can even send and receive SMS (Text Messages) for free via Pidgin. So if it can do all these, does it support everybody's favorite micro-blogging platform Twitter?--Yes it does.

Well, we finally kicked Pidgin 2.5.3 out of the nest, two days late. It's spreading its wings and flying.

Pidgin is almost perfect, it doesn't support Video and audio conversations. Actually it's planned by pidgin authors. We can imagine how difficult this task to accomplish with all messaging protocols but still as dark point of this software. It's also criticized for saving password in readable text files which could put the user privacy at risk but the authors are convinced that "they won't give a false illusion of security" by doing encrypted files ( because they can be broken too).

There was a time when geeks were the only ones who used instant messengers. Not so now. Almost everyone, from high school students to Congressmen, have instant messaging accounts. Businesses use instant messengers like Lotus Sametime or Novell GroupWise within their companies. How did instant messengers get this far?