I'm not an Ubuntu user, so hopefully someone else can clarify. For Thunderbird and web sites, you may be missing additional packages. Search for other beagle packages. On SUSE, for instance, we ship the thunderbird backend separately in a beagle-thunderbird package, and the Firefox extension in a beagle-firefox package. Also depending on how your distro works, you may need to add the Firefox extension by hand.
Thanks. FF is working now.
Support for Gaim should be built in, however. One thing you can try is search your ~/.beagle/Log files for "gaim" and see if there is any information available in there. You could try running the beagle service with only the gaim backend: "beagle --fg --debug --allow-backend gaimlog --replace" and seeing if there are any errors in there.
Thanks.