This is one refreshingly slick looking IM for (Ubuntu) Linux with little red octopus as its logo. Why octopus? I don't know, it's kinda cute though.
Since Synapse still in alpha phase let's be gentle, shall we?
When you start Synapse for the first time, the little red octopus welcomes you to add a new account, a Jabber ID (JID) is needed. If you have Google Talk (gmail) or Live Journal account that should works.

I tried it with my gmail account but it didn't work, oh well, it is alpha and it works (Thank Stavros, who kindly dropped a helpful comment). Just edit your account, on Connection tab put talk.google.com in Connect Server and 5222 in Port.
Let's see what the Preferences menu have to offer.

• Accounts : obviously this is where you add/delete/edit accounts. At this moment you can only have one account, you can not delete, but you can edit it.
• Appearance : this is where you manage how your Friend Lists, Activity Feeds, Emoticon theme looks like. Still in development, so nothing you can do here.
• Message : adjust how messages appears. Its style, variant, font and background.
• Status : nothing yet. My guess is something like : available, offline, busy etc.
  
• Events : nothing yet. My guess is a calendar : birthday, appointment. etc. Or maybe something like Facebook's?
  
• Extension : manage and list plugins, at this moment it includes : Banshee Now Playing, Code Snippets, Flickr, Twitter, Youtube plugins.
• Advanced : nothing yet.
  

No voice/video chat feature to be found. Maybe it will be added later as a built in feature or as a plugin. Here hoping for Yahoo! Messenger plugin :)

For an alpha, Synapse looks very good and promisingly will be rich in features, if things develops as it should, Synapse definitely is going to be my favorite IM and maybe yours?

It's still in alpha, recommended for developers and beta testers. If you want to try it in Ubuntu here's the instruction.

Synapse is created by Eric Butler, with help from Chris Hergert, Allison Hughes, Arno Rehn, Darryl Ring.

update :
- March 29, 2008 : gmail account works

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