Chat Clients

I've been playing with many chat clients lately. None of them seem to meet ALL of my requirements. I have a question for Y!IM, MSNIM, and AIM... Why are your chat clients so bloated? They take a long time to boot and even when loaded tend to be slow to refresh. When chatting in a chat window they all seem fine. Even voice calls are okay but why is the presence list window so slow?

So far the one I like the most doesn't have two features that I think are critical. That being Google Talk or GTalk the application works great for Windows. I really like it because it seems light weight compared to Y!IM, MSNIM, and AIM. It has the standard text chat based IM and it can even log those chats into your GMail account so you can search through them later. Nice feature really. Plus, it has what I think is THE BEST implementation of voice I have used to date. The other chat clients also have voice capabilities but seem to be hampered by the BLOAT of the IM client itself. Even clients like Gizmo and Skype who also have Mac and Linux version of their clients don't seem to do voice better. Now don't get me wrong they all do voice okay, but they tend to get bogged down sometimes even in just text chat mode. I have yet to have that happen with GTalk. Maybe I've been lucky.

I really like how Nokia and Google have integrated GTalk into the Nokia Internet Tablets. Very nice and again the voice portion works great. Gizmo works but the sound sometimes get broken up. I think it's a feedback issue but haven't tested it fully yet. I would really like to test Skype further but none of my friends or family use it and it's kind of it's own island.

That is probably the biggest problem with all of the chat clients. Why is interoperability still an issue? Programs like Pidgin are sort of solving this issue but only in a patch work kind of way. I realize it is a complicated issue but after how many YEARS of having text chat why is it STILL a problem?

Before I forget the two issues I have with GTalk are that there isn't a version for Linux and that you can't record voice chats. I suppose not having a Mac version is also an issue but I don't own one so it's not one for me. :) Yes, I know they have the web based chatting but that is only for text and it is good but I want/need the voice chat feature. I would complain that it is a missing feature of the Nokia Internet Tablet version but it isn't in ANY version. Though is it were I would hope it would also be in the Nokia version too. :) Which kind of brings me back to the no Linux version. Nokia uses ITOS 2008 which is Linux based and integrates GTalk just fine so where is the native Linux version since it already has something like it available?

Oh well, I'll stop here. This has turned into a bad rant, sorry. I was hoping it wouldn't turn into this but it has anyways. All I want is to be able to talk (chat and voice) with friends and family with the ability to record them for either prosparity or for a possible posting or podcast even and to be able to do it from whatever operating system I happen to be in which these days is more Linux than anything else.