A win-win game is a type of game which is designed in a way that all participants can profit from it in one way or the other. (wikipedia)
Quite a few… Don’t you agree? Of course you do! – quite of few different IM (Instant Messaging) software solutions are out there for humanity to use. Funny enough, geography put its "social walls" in between groups of people around the globe, and we all use and know about different tools and products just because "we are from here"… Here is a quick example:
- ICQ was developed by the Israeli company Mirabilis, and first version of the program was released in November 1996. It is very popular in Europe and Asia, but if you ask people in United States, you’ll see an emptiness in the eyes and sometimes a quite common response – "what queue!?".
- Although people from Europe know and use ICQ they prefer MSN that was developed and distributed in US by Microsoft between 1999 and 2005 for computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system.
- People from US use MSN too, but mostly prefer AOL’s AIM which was released in US by company called AOL in May of 1997.
There are "others that use others", and another disturbing fact is that if you need to talk to somebody from US, and you live in Europe, you need to install and run MSN in addition to AIM – so now you have two different applications running. And if you need to use ICQ, guess what – there is another application that you need to install – quite inconvenient. But along with 21st century came GAIM (and brothers: Trillian, Adium and Miranda), which broke, and still brakes, those geographical "social walls" by uniting/combining all the above instant messengers together in one very functional and great looking product. Hence now, by using GAIM, you do not have to install several different applications on your computer, you just install GAIM, and put all your accounts (MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, GoogleTalk, …) into it and use it. It offers "Tabbed message windows", "Logging", "Encrypted messaging" and many more, and of course it is open source, free, runs on multiple operating systems and just plain cool! You did not do it yet!? Go here, download and try it out – feel free to post any comments here, or just e-mail me, if you have any questions – good luck!
P.S. GAIM is far from being classified as news, however, in many companies I go to, I meet people (a number of people) who are using several instant messengers, who never heard about tabs, so they have 7 windows, if they talk to 7 different people, instead of having one with 7 tabs, and when I ask them "do you know what ICQ is?", they still make me smile with a reply: "what queue!?"