Psi: Multi-Platform Messaging

In a world where the vast majority of your contacts will be busily communicating with MSN, Yahoo, AIM, and ICQ, it’s hard to imagine that there’s much of a market for alternative chat clients. After all, what kind of advantages could they possibly offer over these massively-funded, professionally-scripted corporate mainstream clients?

Well, if you were to pose that question to the folks over at Jabber.org, they’d probably start by explaining that their alternative service is open and decentralized, meaning that there’s no corporate “overlord” monitoring all of your chat activities; and then they’d probably touch on the resulting security improvements and the fact that you are therefore free from having to pay for the service or be bombarded by advertisements. Somewhere along the way, they’d probably convince you to check out what they’ve got to offer, and if you’d navigate to the portion of their site where they list a variety of Jabber clients, you’d see one called Psi near the top of the list.

The Psi project was founded way back in 2001 with the goal of creating the best light-weight but fully-featured IM client for the Jabber network. Because everything is open, the client has since, at the hands of numerous volunteers, matured into an extremely efficient and flexible instant messaging technology. Its user base now includes millions of Mac, Windows, and Linux users worldwide, and Psi has helped inspire many corporate and educational institutions to switch to the Jabber network for their communications.

So why Psi? Perhaps the main reason that Psi has become so popular is the fact that one of the project’s main goals was always accessibility. Besides the fact that the client has been optimized to run like a charm on all three major operating systems, it’s also got the added advantage of having been diligently translated into more than twenty different languages by dedicated users worldwide, so that you can feel at home with Psi no matter where you are. This linguistic versatility has an added dimension though: Psi also has full support for the Unicode international text standard, so that users can converse using symbols and accents without a problem — even if the text is running right-to-left!

Then you’ve got security. Psi recognizes that sometimes you’re going to be chatting from unsecured networks like public WiFi hotspots, so it makes use of the robust SSL cryptographic technology that powers many online shopping platforms in order to safely encrypt all chat communications. Psi also includes support for OpenPGP message encryption protocols for more advanced security needs.

But Psi wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful and popular as it is if it wasn’t user-friendly too, so it should come as no surprise that the client is fully customizable; you can change and replace everything from the colours and emoticons to the client skins and icons. Even keyboard shortcuts and toolbars can be modified to suit your personal chatting needs. The best part is that the variety of these modifications is constantly expanding and evolving as Psi’s thriving community continues to put out hundreds of solutions, all completely free.

In seven years of development, project leader Justin Karneges and the rest of the development team have learned that paying attention to your users is a great way to keep them happy. As a result, the Psi project is constantly implementing new developments that have been requested, in an effort to keep their client ideal for as many users as possible. Need the ability to have multi-user chats? Psi can do that. Need to be able to perform remote client control operations? Not a problem for Psi. Herein lies one of Psi’s greatest advantages: the fact that its development is so responsive to the needs of its community.

Now inevitably, as Mac users, we will all raise an eyebrow at this point and say, “oh really?” as we glance over to the cheerful green bird that handles so many of our chatting needs: Adium. How does Psi compare to Adium? Is it worth switching? Is the icon as cute? But it’s important to realize that a comparison between Psi and Adium is inherently flawed, because the two clients are made for different things. It’s like comparing toasters and microwave ovens: sure, they both heat things up, but they’re used for different purposes. Likewise, Psi and Adium are both chat clients, but they’re not aiming for the same crowd.

Adium is a robust, Mac-centred chat platform that’s built to be able to connect to just about every possible chat protocol under the sun; from the corporate giant clients to Jabber and more. It tries to do this in the most feature-rich and flexible way possible and, arguably, it succeeds. Psi, on the other hand, is a cross-platform solution that focuses its efforts entirely on Jabber. It doesn’t even try to support the others because the whole point of the project is to further the advancement of the Jabber networks. It tries to do this while keeping computer resource consumption as modest as possible, even though it also does its best to be as flexible as can be.

So, in the end, Psi can be said to succeed at what it’s trying to do. After all, after seven years in the game, it’s hard to deny that they must be doing something right. It may not be as service-friendly as Adium, but it’s not trying to be. Psi is a powerful, efficient, accessible, and popular Jabber client with an active community of developers and supporters, and a responsive production team. If you’re looking for a Jabber-only chatting solution that will keep you in touch with other Jabberers (Jabberians? Jabbies?) no matter what OS they’re using, then you could do a whole lot worse than Psi. It’s available for download (free, of course) from the project’s website, and you’ll also find a huge selection of customizations with a quick Google search.

Chatting is an important part of our online lives; tell us about your experiences with Psi: Do you use it? Would you use it over Adium if you could? Are you a fan of an entirely different client? Let us know!

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