It has a texting only feature and video chat, with an app or it can be used on the desktop. It is very easy, if he can have that app on his phone.  But many men use it for work or family stuff and don’t want to set up another one and get mixed up, or have to explain why it’s on their phone if they don’t use it.  And I don’t want to encourage men to ask me to cam.  Bleh.

3) Trillian

It’s an IM aggregator where in theory you can give it your IM logins to other services and then talk to everyone on any IM service. It has an app and a desktop version and is free. I got it working so he could see what I was typing, but I could not see responses from his Yahoo.  Ugh.

4) Oldapps.com

I poked around looking for a way to download a previous version of the Yahoo IM app, that worked mostly fine for me until last week. I don’t know quite enough about it to try it, but may explore further if I don’t get other options to work.

5) Set up your own chat room

This would be text only but could be a good short term alternative. There are IRC chat apps and it’s available online through the web – nothing to download and sit on the phone. I use mibbit.com

No log of the conversation. Very private. Not even an ID except for the owner. You set it up, give him the URL and type.  This may be the safest place on the internet but most people aren’t familiar with it so it takes some time to learn the commands.

6) Facebook messenger

Set up fake account for him. Use messenger. It has video options.  Just have to be careful of their “you may also know” suggestions if it starts recommending your fake account to real people in your life or his life. And delete messages manually.

I also tried several that are meant for military or business super-secure communications, but they were too cumbersome to set up, or deleted messages as I was reading them, which I found unusable.  And it would be very tough to explain the app on a guy’s phone.

I’ve heard that some people play the “Words with Friends” game, which has a chat feature embedded.  I haven’t tried that. Anyone had any luck with it? 

I keep Googling to search for more. There are new ones all the time.

Then a real possibility came from another source. 

Today my pal The Pup suggested we try Kik.  He’s such a good egg to look for options!  I’d heard of it from various people.  I installed it and poked around. It was easy to install on my phone, and then uninstall again if need be. It was easy to sign up. It let me delete or block contacts. It let me send photos pretty easily! It’s only available on the phone, which is a bit of a downer, and it deletes everything after a pretty short time, which is probably good for most folks but problematic for me as a blogger!  We’ll see if this one is the answer!  

If you have any other chatting ideas, please let me know!