Skype (messenger) alternatives

Dinkas · 9 Mar 2014 at 05:19

I have to get rid of Skype as it's driving me nuts. Every time I try and type a message, an advert scrolls down from the top and steals focus from the message box meaning I have to keep clicking Skype and typing over and over.

Is there anything that isn't Skype just for messenger duties? I'd quite happily ditch MS altogether and use something that actually does what it's supposed to rather than be a jack of all trades useless at everything piece of bloatware.

cypto · 9 Mar 2014 at 05:32

Might not exactly be useful but I have since ditched using skype for the same advertisement reasons and stick to using steam. I mean you don't need to have games installed to use the voice chat, message features.

trentlad · 9 Mar 2014 at 07:13

Last year a friend mentioned ooVoo which is available across all platforms (iphone/android/windows/mac).

What attracts me to them is the multiple video conferencing feature, but there aren't too many occations where you need to video chat with multiple members of family so Skype remains the defacto.

If you give them a try let us know what you think on here.

geuben · 9 Mar 2014 at 07:47

Google Hangouts

Dinkas · 9 Mar 2014 at 09:52

Hm, I do use Steam a bit, didn't think of its inbuilt stuff. I'll give it a try.

Oovoo probably is better than Skype, but I'm only wanting IM functionality.

Google hangouts requires Chrome does it not?

Anyhoo, appreciate the suggestions, many thanks

geuben · 9 Mar 2014 at 10:03

I can't remember how I did it, it might have been the hangouts extension for chrome that did it, but anyway hangouts is installed on my machine as a background app so I don't need to have chrome open for it to work.

trentlad · 10 Mar 2014 at 20:58

So are you after IM programs that work on phone and PC or is it only phone to phone?

If the later then there's nothing better than Whatsapp

Orcvader · 10 Mar 2014 at 21:09

geuben said:
I can't remember how I did it, it might have been the hangouts extension for chrome that did it, but anyway hangouts is installed on my machine as a background app so I don't need to have chrome open for it to work.

This. It's a chrome extension but it can work in the background so it appears as a normal program. Hangouts has became my replacement for Skype, and I find the video calls to be better as well.