If you go in with the right exspectations, you’ll love it

Flamingo is an XMPP chat client. XMPP is a communications protocol used by Facebook and Google Talk to send text chat messages, so the developer includes an easy way to hook into those services using offically supported methods. However, they cannot reach deep into those services to grab things like message history or connect to video and audio chat. They also aren’t able to do group chats on fb and google, so they just don’t put group chat functionally in the program.

It’s kind of cool how Flamingo works within those limitations. It offers a bunch of ways to make one to one chat cool, like inline photos and videos. One thing I really like is unified contacts: if you have a friend who uses multiple services, Flamingo will automatically choose the one where they’re currently online. If they are online multiple services, you can switch services in the chat window pretty easily. And it all fits in one window that you don’t have to think about too much.

I don’t blame the developers for talking about hangouts and facebook before mentioning XMPP. I also think they did as good a job as they could of marketing it to people who don’t know about XMPP while still handling exspectations, but they obviously didn’t get to everyone. I do understand that it isn’t what everyone wants out of chat client. However, I was looking for an XMPP client, so I’m super happy with it, and I think a lot of people could be too.

Brian Berk about Flamingo