Odigo is a Great Idea which, like most Great Ideas on the internet, falls a touch short of the mark due to some silly functionality issues.

The idea is that it's a chat client which can be used to IM (Instant Message) people who are on ICQ, AIM, Yahoo and MSN Messenger, as well as other Odigo users. A fantastic idea since many of us have passed through these services, picked up enormous buddy lists and now have to use lots of different clients to keep up with their cyber-social lives. That, and ICQ; frankly, it sucks and anyone would be mad to not want a break from that incredibly bad GUI.

It's also feature packed, as these things are; it has a weird "people finder" which works much as ICQ's does only with a radar scope kind of graphic, a POP3 and webmail email notifier which checks your mail for you if you so desire, and it has voice chat after a fashion, but only in between Odigo users.

Where it falls flat is with its daft (not as bad as ICQ but still) GUI, its main window which is unexpandable, the menus which are non standard and badly laid out - and the all important system resource drain. Don't leave this baby on for too long, or your computer may be unable to work after a while. It can be cured by a quick restart as usual, but it's a major bug/pain in the arse.

All in all, it looks great which is fine for some but clutters its usability; the inter-service features work well enough but occasionally Odigo will refuse to connect to one or other of them, prompting a retry to connect, and maybe even a restart of the client application altogether. But it's still worth trying, so something about it must be good 'cos I'm not usually willing to put up with so many faults in my apps.

Get it, try it, but don't be uninstalling Yahoo Messenger for a while yet...

STOP PRESS!
Thanks to killerpenguin who told me about Trillian which does what Odigo tries to do and succeeds far better AND can connect to IRC as well. Sorry Odigo, but bye bye...

STOP PRESS! Only Trillian too can cause system resource problems, still not as often as Odigo, but you've been warned. Oh well, you pays yer money, ($0), you takes yer choice...