macJasp

Using iChat with GTalk and MSN Messenger

For a while now i've been wanting to use a single Instant Messaging client and being a Mac user my preference is obviously iChat, however hardly any of my contacts are users of iChat, most using the popular MSN Messenger, so i wanted a way of using iChat to talk to my multiple IM buddies.

After digging around i've managed to get a working solution which i've summarised below. With a few simple step and 10 minutes out of your day, you can get this working really well.

Setup iChat with Google Talk

Firstly, sign into your iChat with your Gtalk account, just follow the instructions from here

iChat and Google Talk

Once complete, you will have all your Google Talk friends listed withing iChat.

Get iChat talking to your MSN buddies

The trickier part is adding your MSN contacts, to do this you need to download a Jabber client called Psi and add an MSN protocol, which basically works as a 'bridge' between GTalk and MSN.

Detailed instructions of which can be found here Connect Google Talk to MSN

** note ** One thing to point out is the steps above need a slight adjustment, the part that states you add ursine.ca as the Jabber server is incorrect, use jabber.anywise.com and you'll get a full list of servers where you can select the MSN transport

Just make sure you follow the instructions to the letter and you won't go far wrong in being able to use one IM client for all your cross platform IM buddies going forward

Tweet your loved Last.fm tracks on Twitter

I really like the way you can pick a track on Blip.fm and then tweet it directly to Twitter , being a fan of Last.fm i would love that same integration but that’s just not there at the moment, however there is a workaround available that goes somewhere close.

Twitterfeed monitors RSS feeds from your blog or other websites and then at a specified interval will automatically check for the last ‘untweeted’ feed and tweet it. So by giving it the RSS feed of your loved tracks from Last.fm you can get somewhere close to the Blip.fm fuctionality.

The Last.fm RSS feed will be as follows (here, replacing my username macasp with your own) feed://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/user/macjasp/lovedtracks.rss Sign yourself up with Twitterfeed, (it’s all secure and uses OpenID) and once logged in add a new RSS feed (as per the image), set the update frequency that Twitterfeed will use to check your Last.fm RSS feed along with your chosen shortened URL link (tinyurl here)

Finally prefix each tweet with #lastfm #love, which seems to be the standard hash tag for lastfm tweets Save the feed and your loved tracks will be tweeted (here within 30 minutes) An example from my own tweets based on the above setup is below to give you an idea how it looks.

The tinyurl link takes you directly to the song in question within Last.fm One thing to note is if you love more than one last.fm track at once, Twitterfeed will only tweet the last loved track.

Stream Spotify & BLIP.FM to multiple speakers