Yesterday I published my ponderings (in Greek) about whether or not Instant Messaging (IM) is still a popular method of communications, or whether it's died down and other mediums have more or less replaced IM, or at the very least really cut into its market share. Back in the day I used to IM with almost all types of protocols (Yahoo, ICQ, AIM, MSN, etc.) When I decided to get back into IMing, I tried the free apps on the AppStore like Nimbuzz, but they didn't really satisfy me as a user.

When Beejive came out I decided to give it a try and I was really impressed. Setting up my accounts was a breeze and I love the fact that it can pull information from my contacts application so it can display a contact's actual name. The other feature I love is that if I have a contact with multiple logins (i.e. they have a yahoo and an MSN account), the contact shows up and there is a little icon that indicates how many of their accounts they are logged into.

There is a drawback however. When Push Notifications came out I assumed that I could go into Beejive, log into my accounts and then just press the home button, go about my day, and whenever someone messaged me it would popup. Well, while this does work, I get notification from Beejive that some account timed out, or logged me off, so I have to go back in and re-login. I guess this is where background processing would be great. I would love to leave beejive running in the background so that I don't get booted.

The second drawback is more of a feature request. Many services these days, including MSN and Yahoo, have video chat features. Even though the iPhone does not have a front facing camera, it would be nice to allow at least one-way video communication on the phone and have a duplex voice channel going.

All things considered I like the app a lot. Maybe jailbreaking and running backgrounder could solve the logout problem :-)