Empathy (software)

Empathy is a discontinued instant messaging (IM) and voice over IP (VoIP) client which supports text, voice, video, file transfers, and inter-application communication over various IM communication protocols.

Empathy was created by forking the Gossip project started by Michael Hallendal, Richard Hult and later maintained by Martyn Russell. It was forked because there were disagreements amongst contributors about the backend at the time. It was initially completely XMPP based (similar to Google Talk and Facebook's chat implementations), but others wanted it to use the Telepathy stack. This led to the forking and new name Empathy.

Empathy also provides a collection of reusable graphical user interface widgets for developing instant messaging clients for the GNOME desktop. It is written as extension to the Telepathy framework, for connecting to different instant messaging networks with a unified user interface.

Version 0.12 was released in 2007. Empathy has been included in the GNOME desktop since its version 2.24, in Ubuntu since version 9.10 (Karmic Koala), and in Fedora since version 12 (Constantine); Empathy has replaced Pidgin as their default messenger application.

Empathy is no longer under development by the GNOME team.

Empathy natively supports protocols, implemented in Telepathy framework: XMPP (including configuration for Facebook IM, Google Talk, though Gizmo5, LiveJournal Talk, Nokia Ovi and other Jabber servers also supported), salut link-local XMPP for local network peer discovery, MSNP (to Microsoft Messenger service as used by MSN Messenger or Windows Live Messenger), IRC and SIP. Additional protocols are supported with libpurple plug-in: OSCAR (AIM/ICQ/MobileMe), Bonjour (Apple's implementation of Zeroconf), MySpaceIM, QQ, MXit, Novell GroupWise, YMSG, Gadu-Gadu, Lotus Sametime, SIMPLE, SILC, Zephyr.

Automatic features include auto away and extended away using gnome-screensaver, and auto re-connect using NetworkManager. One-on-one and group chats include smileys and spell checking. Conversation windows can be themed. Conversations can be logged, which can be viewed or searched, and prepended to new chats.

Additional features include: