Some of the best messaging applications for PC and Cell phones

Since the human race emerged, we have sought the best ways to communicate with our fellow human beings. Whether through sounds, paintings, gestures, homing pigeons, I believe that communication is the most important factor in being able to live in society.

With the technological age, email was one of the first ways to communicate with our co-workers, family and friends, no matter where they were.

But we felt the need for communication to be faster, in less time and the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) created by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 arose. A service that became popular immediately, but like many, died of the hand in hand with other "more social" services.

Of course, I am talking about instant messaging clients like AOL, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and protocols like XMPP (Jabber), which allowed more modern services such as Facebook and GMail to have their own communication channel.

WhatsApp is an alternative that is increasingly in demand by users around the world, but for GNU / Linux users it is not the only one, and in fact, not even the preferred one.

Many still prefer the old Jabber to communicate, which still serves us in our favorite messaging clients of which we will talk next.

Messaging Clients

En GNU / Linux We have many applications to communicate, through different services. Among the most popular (if not the best), we have Pidgin, Empathy, KDE Telepathy and even the popular PSI.

The best thing about these applications is that they allow us to connect to several services at the same time, they are free and very powerful.

But, in recent years, the way we consume information has changed a bit, and cell phones have been playing a bigger role.

In this type of device, the aforementioned applications have no place, either because mobile versions have not been developed, or because we lose usability when using them the way they are conceived.

Luckily, for the different operating systems (iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Android, Firefox OS ... etc) we also have applications for this purpose. I cannot speak based on any of them, as I have tried very few.

We can download WhatsApp for free, but if we want other ways and services to communicate, right now Chat IM It has been one of the best alternatives given the amount of them that we can use.

In fact, it is an application so pleasant and beautiful to look at that it makes you want to port it to your desktop, not to mention that it is constantly updated. The downside is that it seems to me that it is only available for Firefox OS.

Anyway, for iOS, Android and Blackberry, a very interesting solution would be BBM (BlackBerry Messenger), which allows us to send messages through the system using a PIN.

In summary, if we are connected to our computer my recommendation is Pidgin, if we are using FirefoxOS then Loqui IM, and for the rest of the mobile operating systems, you should know better than me 😀