Life was so simple back when only one or two instant messaging networks existed – this was the era before Facebook and Twitter. Now however, even novice PC users connect to about half a dozen IM and social networking sites including Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, AIM and so on. Most people use separate desktop clients to connect to these services – needless to say this consumes a lot of RAM and may even clutter your system with too many running processes. If you use more than one social media/instant messaging service to keep in touch with your friends, you should check out Trillian. Trillian is an application that lets you connect to all these services through a simple interface. A beta of Trillian 5 is now available to the public and for those who are using Windows 7 and Windows Vista, this is a highly recommended download.
Trillian 5 is a major upgrade over previous 4.X Trillian Astra releases – and Cerulean studios seem to have got a lot of things right with this release. First and foremost, Trillian 5 is faster than ever. I’ve been using Astra for several months and the new version felt a lot smoother and more responsive the moment I tried it. As always, RAM consumption was fairly low with the memory resident module using around 30MB max (around 15MB average) memory.
Trillian’s user interface has seen some massive improvements in v5. It’s no longer the cluttered layout that made you jump hoops to read a Twitter update or interact with your Facebook account. Trillian 5 features separate modules and direct integration with both Twitter and Facebook (alongside a number of other services, with support for more possible via plugins) – following and managing these services via the app is now a pleasure.
On top of UI and speed improvements, Trillian 5 comes packed with numerous other features such as synchronized chat history, Foursquare with GPS support, native video and audio chat, group chat, file transfers, compact mode, full Windows 7 integration, support for over 18 different IM and social media services including IRC and POP3 Email, fully skinnable interface, etc.
Note that Trillian 5 is currently in beta, I’ve been using the beta version for several days and so far but haven’t come across any major issues or crashes apart from several minor glitches. The pre release version looks very much usable and is highly recommended to anyone who users Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging extensively.
Download
[Click Here] to download the latest version of Trillian 5 beta
[Click Here] to read the Trillian 5 tour
