Anyone know why ichat doesn’t provide a search function to locate friends like Skype? I’d like to try to use ichat but it seems you can only talk to friends that have either an AIM or MAC account. What’s with that? Most of my friends have PC’s, not Macs.
— velieg
You can use iChat to connect with people on MobileMe, AIM or Jabber (like Gmail). It uses those systems. Windows users can certainly use AIM or Jabber. But if they choose to use something like MSN then you need to get the MSN Messenger application to chat with them.
I assume there is no way to search for someone because there is no public directory of people that happen to have chat accounts on these systems.
Thanks for the reply although I'm not sure I understand it. Does this mean for example that verizon customers can't talk to ATT customers on the different systems? AIM, Jabber & Mac can talk to each other, and MSN, Skype can talk to each other but the two systems can't talk to each other? Sorry for the ignorance, but I'm trying to understand this.
Well, AT&T and verizon are a bad example because they are networks to themselves. Those chat protocols you mention all exist on the public Internet. It is just a matter of what the chat program supports. iChat happens to support those three, and not the others. That's all. The are tons of alternative chat programs you can download to use the other chat protocols.