Yahoo retired its old Messenger protocol in favor of a new one, breaking compatibility with third-party applications, such as Pidgin, Empathy, and so on.

Read more »

Variety wallpaper changer

Variety is a wallpaper changer that can automatically download wallpapers from various sources, like Flikr, Wallhaven, Bing Photo of the Day, Unslash, Desktoppr, NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day, as well as a live wallpaper of the world sunlight map. It can also automatically fetch wallpapers recommended by other Variety users.

The app was updated recently with a new "safe mode" option, which can be used to avoid NSFW and sketchy images. This feature relies on user ratings, so it's not perfect, at least until more users rate the wallpapers.

Read more »

`SkypeWeb Plugin for Pidgin` allows communicating with your Skype contacts using the SkypeWeb protocol. Right now, the Pidgin plugin doesn't support voice or video calls.

Developed by Eion Robb, the Skype4Pidgin developer, SkypeWeb Plugin for Pidgin has a major advantage over the old Skype4Pidgin plugin: it doesn't require Skype to run in the background.

Read more »

Purple Hangouts is a libpurple plugin which adds support for the proprietary protocol that Google uses for its Hangouts service.

Using it, you can get extra Google Hangouts features that aren't available through the XMPP interface in Pidgin and other applications that use libpurple.

Among the extra features (compared to using XMPP) provided by Purple Hangouts are group chats, self messages, synchronized history between devices and SMS support via Google Voice.

You can see a feature comparison between using Google Hangouts in Pidgin via XMPP and using the Purple Hangouts plugin, HERE.

Read more »

Read more »

Facebook shut down their XMPP service earlier this year and because of this, Pidgin/libpurple no longer supports Facebook Chat. For those of you who want to use Facebook Chat in Pidgin, there's a new plugin which makes this possible, called purple-facebook.

Pidgin Facebook

Read more »

Telegram Purple is a Pidgin (and other Libpurple-based messengers) plugin which adds support for Telegram.

Pidgin Telegram Ubuntu

Read more »

Pidgin uses the Ubuntu Messaging Menu but many people prefer its old tray icon, which you could whitelist to use the systray. 

That's no longer possible out of the box with Ubuntu 13.04 and 13.10 because the Unity systray whitelist was removed (there is a PPA that restores the systray whitelist though) but luckily, Philip Langdale has created a plugin for Pidgin that provides an Ubuntu AppIndicator.

Pidgin Indicator Ubuntu

Read more »