Wednesday Time Saver: Use Pidgin To Do Skype IM
February 27th, 2008 (7:00am) Jason Harris 3 Comments
Use Skype IM within Pidgin
For those of us who use instant messaging to conduct our day-to-day business, we know the frustrations of having multiple friends spread throughout all the major IM platforms including Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, and Skype. Pidgin is a freeware multi-protocol IM product that allows access to all your contacts from Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, and many more systems. However, Skype however was always closed off.
Not any longer, thanks to the Skype API and the Skype API Plugin for Pidgin. Using this free plugin, you can instant message back and forth with your Skype contacts within Pidgin. At this point, it isn’t possible to do voice calling from Pidgin. However every Skype contact is brought into Pidgin for easy access. Because Pidgin is cross-platform, this functionality is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
3 Comments Post your own comment
Scott T. says: February 27th, 2008 7:45am
The plugin for Adium 1.2 works fine. I notice this requires Skype to run in the background and talks to the Skype instance running on the Mac, not directly to the Skype service … but at least my IM UI is consistent now…
R4f says: February 27th, 2008 9:29am
You said
.
In fact, it’s largely better than that : it’s free software!
:-)
Leonid Mamchenkov says: February 27th, 2008 3:10pm
This is extra cool! Thanks for sharing.
It would have been twice extra super cool if it didn’t require a running Skype instance. Maybe later. But even if not, this is so much better than before. :)