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Babuki is a new Facebook app that somehow thinks it has a chance at stealing the lead from Facebook’s IM client which is coming out this week - how? We’re not sure. Fortunately, TechCruch is –

Aly Chesney, an Oxford University dropout who has worked on Babuki with a few of his peers, points out two main advantages to his product: it can be used both through the Facebook website itself and through an AIR-based desktop client. And it works with other IM services such as AIM, Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, MySpace, Livejournal, and even Social.IM.

Babuki also provides other useful features such as the ability to make yourself invisible to certain Facebook friends and to set a wider range of status messages (Away, Extended Away, Busy, etc.)

The interoperability Babuki provides with other IM services is certainly the main advantage it has over Facebook Chat, which will eschew the Jabber (XMPP) protocol in favor of a proprietary one. The Mac and PC compatible desktop client also gets a big thumbs up from me.

See more at TechCrunch.

The Changelog for Spark 2.5.1beta1 has a bunch of bug fixes, particularly Vista, Mac and Linux compat stuff; so its most likely worth an update for you.

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Gaim Renamed — Now Pidgin IM

“Announced on the Gaim mailing lists earlier today, the Gaim project is being renamed. This follows a lengthy and, unfortunately, secret legal process with AOL, which also prevented any code releases except betas. The project will now be known as Pidgin IM. Development is being migrated off of sourceforge.net as well and is now being hosted on developer.pidgin.im”