Coccinella - the whiteboard thrill just doesn't last

Despite its seriously flawed name, Coccinella, the open source IM client, has some interesting features that might make you do a double take. The idea of chatting and having the ability to draw on a whiteboard, as well as play chess during a chat session sounds like fun, so I decided to give it a spin.

I learned from the process that Coccinella is the Latin name for ladybug. It is not, as I had thought originally, a bacteria found in pond scum. I continued my pursuit, preferring to focus on the cute little ladybug in the logo and ignore the unfortunate "ella" associations with the name.

Coccinella is a free download for Windows, Linux and Mac. After downloading the application, the set up assistant leads you to select from a list of servers to open a new account on. Although Coccinella can connect to any Jabber/XMPP instant messaging server including Google Talk, AOL, MSN and ICQ, you have to dig for information to find out how. The set up assistant leads you to select from various servers and so I created an account with Jabber.org. I was happy I did.

At first, I wanted to use Coccinella IM client with Google Talk. After digging around for information on how to make this happen and finally succeeding, I selected Google Talk as the profile and input my Google user name and password to log in.

Coccinella populated all of my Google contacts and I was ready to go. Unfortunately, the whiteboard feature, which was the entire reason I wanted to try ladybug Coccinella in the first place, was not there.

Undaunted, I asked my esteemed chat friend to join me on Jabber.org (which I was able to do quickly since I had just created an account), I created a chatroom, and was delighted to see and use the whiteboard feature. That was for about 20 seconds, after which, I realized the whiteboard is kind of ridiculous, similar to the novelty of the idog, ifish, and - well you get the picture.

Since my chat partner and I were working and being productive, we decided to use the game feature and play cards together. Sorry, no deal. A deck of cards landed in our chatroom, but try as we might, we couldn't get the cards to do anything but sit there, dead in the middle of our brilliant artwork on the whiteboard.

It happened simultaneously, when the deck of cards just sat there. It was our aha moment and we both knew we didn't like ladybug that much and wanted it to fly far, far away.

To be fair, there are legitimate reasons to use Coccinella, and here are our top 5.

1. You like to channel John Madden and sketch football plays.
2. You're part of a design team and you have no collaboration software.
3. You're a geek and live for the challenge of getting apps to work as advertised. Time spent is unimportant.
4. You're a kid between the ages of 9 - 17 and novelty resonates with you.
5. You have never heard of Meebo and don't like things ready to use out of the box.
   

What is your top reason to use Coccinella? Is it the whiteboard? Let us know.

Tags: Coccinella, IM client with whiteboard, ImClientWithWhiteboard, jabber, open source, OpenSource