Instant Messengers – Excite

Excite Messenger
http://messenger.excite.com
= interesting, promising

Excite Messenger is a brand new IM (Instant Messenger)featuring many multimedia features.

It is still a bit unstable but it looks like a promising tool for the ones of you who are lucky enough to have a speedy connection (56K and above).

While Excite Messenger sports a nice and slick interface, it provides a number of good services and facilities, previously unavailable in other IMs.

Excite Messenger misses all of the file exchange and peer-to-peer features we have been looking at so far, but breaks new grounds in integrating rich media content in a tiny little desktop tool.

The facilities and services that Excite Messenger provides are:

Basic Instant Messaging: Like with the other tools you know you can create also here your "buddy list" to talk to your friends instantly.

Buddy Card: With this interesting feature, it is possible to share photos, Web links, and up-to-date contact information.

Personalised Content: this is one of the features that I personally liked the most. You can in fact customise much of the specialized content Excite Messenger can download for you.
For example under the section Wheather, one can set to see the next 3-day forecast for any number of cities in the world. I was then able to easily setup a view that instantly shows me the present and expected wheather conditions not only here in Rome, but also in Manila, Bangkok, Cairo and Surabaya (Indonesia). Quite impressive and useful for a frequent traveller.

The same customisation power can be applied to sport and stock news, and radio and TV listings. Unfortunately, this last category is heavily biased in favour of US programming though you can find listings for global TV networks as ESPN, CNN and others.

Email: This feature allows to get notified of new email messages without the need to open a Web browser or your email program.

Online radio: Excite Messenger offers also a nifty set of preselected online radio stations which can be easily tuned in at any time. I liked the easy way to get at them, and I enjoyed for the first time in a long time, an easy access to my favourite San Francisco radio, without a glitch.

Search: This is a simple interface utility that will call in your browser to perform custom and specialty searches on the appropriate Excite custom search section.

Future in the stars: Excite Messenger offers also a well integrated personal horoscope, which I found better than many similar services seen before. Inobtrusive as all other features, it allows to automatically read within the IM interface your daily horoscope, and if you want the one of any other sign. Interestingly enough, the few times I have consulted it, it was right on the mark.

Overall, very interesting, though geared to who has good and speedy connections (prove me wrong, please).

Nonetheless its version number (hidden in the Help menu of the IM, the program is basically brand new, and as all, it is still buggy. Be prepared for some unexpected Excite Messenger crashes, at least until a new release is out. Mine is 2.0.0.23.

You can download your own FREE copy of Excite Messenger at:
http://messenger.excite.com

Excite Messenger exists in two versions: for PCs and Macs.

These are its system requirements
PC: • Windows 95/98/2000/NT/ME Internet Explorer 4.0 or Netscape Navigator 4.0 or higher

Macintosh: • MacOS 7.6.1 through MacOS 9.x QuickTime 3.0 (QuickTime 4 for the Tune In module) Internet Explorer 4.0 or Netscape Navigator 4.0 or higher

Download your free copy of Excite Messenger at:
http://messenger.excite.com