Trillian has launched a public beta of Trillian Astra, the company's updated chat client for AOL, Yahoo!, Windows Live, Google, and other instant messaging service. Trillian Astra also lets you update your status on Facebok and Twitter, something earlier versions of the IM client couldn't do.

The application has been in private testing for what seems like forever, but a few months ago the company started giving out beta invitations like there was no tomorrow. So removing the "private" label was probably just a formality.

Trillian Astra is available for Windows 200, XP, Vista, or 7. The company is working on Mac, iPhone, and web clients, but those aren't available to the public yet. You can sign up to be notified when those versions are available at the download page. Or you could just use Pidgin or Adium.

[via CNet]

Digsby is a multi-protocol chat and social networking client that lets you update your Facebook, MySpace and Twitter status or chat with your AIM, Windows Live, Google Talk, or Yahoo! Messenger. Overall, it's a pretty awesome little utility if you'd rather use one application to track all of your accounts at once. But it's historically been a bit of a resource hog.

Now there's a new alpha version that reduces the CPU use by about 30 percent, improves file transfers for AIM and Windows Live users, and lets you set the status updates on MySpace accounts. There are also new emoticon boxes.

Probably the best part is that it just feels a bit faster. In the past, Digsby had a tendency to make my computer lock up for a second or two before displaying incoming IM messages. Now it doesn't.

You can find out how to join Digsby's group of Alpha testers at the Digsby blog. Bear in mind, once you become an Alpha tester you're signing up to receive less stable versions of the software and you could experience some bugs.

[via WebWare]

Remember the first time you realized that not all of your friends used the same instant messaging service? If you were on AIM and they were using MSN messenger you either had to sign up for a new service and run two desktop applications or shoot them frequent emails. And then came Trillian, one of the first programs to let users interact with contacts on multiple IM networks from a single application.

Over the years, other applications joined the party, including Pidgin, Miranda, and Digsby. And Trillian sort of fell out of the limelight. Two and a half years ago the company began alpha testing its next generation instant messenger called Trillian Astra. But it's been locked away behind an invite-only wall ever since.

And this week Lifehacker noted that pretty much anyone who signs up for a beta invite is being sent one almost immediately. That means two things. First, if you want to check out Trillian Astra, you can likely do it now. Second, a public release is probably coming soon. I could be wrong on the latter point, but I don't think so.

The latest version of Trillian Astra adds support for social networking services including Facebook and Twitter as well as instant messaging services, which means it could give Digsby a run for its money. Right now only a Windows version of the chat client is available, but OS X and iPhone versions are in the works as well. If you sign up for a beta invite, you may get a notice one of these days letting you know that those versions are available for download.

Meebo is a web-based chat client that lets you keep up with your AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, and Windows Live Messenger contacts. Now Meebo has rolled out support for two more chat clients: Facebook and MySpace.

The move makes sense, since Meebo's goal is to allow you to chat with all of your contacts in one space. But you still need to have a web browser open to use Meebo, which is why I generally prefer standalone clients like Digsby. If your browser crashes, your Digsby contact list doesn't disappear.

That said, Meebo does provide a way to chat with contacts using 9 different IM clients now, and you can do it all from a single web page. So you don't need to leave Facebook, Gmail, or MySpace open all day if all you care about is the chat features. And more importantly, since Meebo is web-based, you can use the service from any computer without stopping to install software. That makes it useful if you're visiting a friend or family member and want to pop online for a bit, or if you're using a public computer at a library or internet cafe.

[via CNET

AIM Blast is a new AOL Instant Messenger feature that makes me feel old, because I just realized that it's been a decade since I first wondered why there was no way to IM multiple buddies without opening a chatroom. Well, it's finally here, and it works pretty well. You can't make a Blast Group from within AIM, but if you go to blast.aim.com, you can set up and edit a group from there. Blast seems to work with third-party AIM clients, although AOL says that Meebo may have some problems with it.

The Blast Group will then show up on your buddy list, and any IM you send to it will go to everyone in the group. The group acts like a normal AIM account, it just puts people's individual screennames in front of their messages, so you know who's talking. When you invite people (using your group admin page), they'll get a message in AIM asking them to accept or decline. Once they're in, they can IM the group, unless you make it admin-only. That makes your group more like a notification system than a chat, but that may work better for some people.

Digsby is probably one of the coolest free Windows applications released in recent memory. The utility is like Pidgin mashed up with Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, and it has email notifiers for Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail as well as other services thrown in for good measure. There's just one problem: Digsby is a major resource hog.

Early builds of Digsby have been known to eat over 100MB of memory. If you've got 4GB of RAM, that might not seem like much. But if you have an older PC with 1GB or less, there's no reason that a messenging program should eat up 10% or more of your memory.

A few days ago, Digsby pushed out a new alpha release that addresses the memory issue. I find that the alpha version tends to hover around 30MB of memory use, and according to the developers, it shouldn't go much higher than 50MB even if you register a ton of email and social networking accounts.

The new version also features other performance enhancements, and improvements that will attempt to help you get around firewalls and proxy servers if necessary. There's also a new crash reporter.

Keep in mind, the latest version of Digsby is still in alpha, which means there are likely plenty of bugs to be worked out. Normally I wouldn't recommend replacing stable software with an alpha. But if you've been frustrated with Digsby's high resource usage in the past, you should really check out the latest version. Just make sure to backup your settings first.

It's been a while since AOL launched an updated version if its instant messenger for Windows Mobile. The new version is still in beta, but it has some nifty features that make it worth checking out. The first thing you'll notice is that the interface is much more attractive. But it's also more useful.

When you first login you're greeted with a buddy list. You can double tap on any contact to enter a chat window. After you've initiated a chat you can flip back to your buddy list knowing that you'll be able to see all open chats and any new messages in the sidebar that now pops up.

You can also manage your buddy list from the client. And the settings menu has a nice array of options letting you customize your notification, conversation, and privacy settings.

This beta supports devices running Windows Mobile 5.0 and 6.

[via The Boy Genius Report]

AOL is getting serious about opening up its popular instant messenger application. A few months ago the company launched the Open AIM initiative, making available the APIs and documentation developers need to add AIM features to third party applications or to develop third party plugins for AIM. Now AOL, which happens to be this blog's parent company, has announced the winners of a $100,000 design competition. Winning entries included applications that let you:

• Instantly translate messages from one language to another
• Preview an URL in an IM by hovering your mouse over it
• Manage your RSS feeds from within AIM
• Share your desktop with another AIM user
• Convert text-based instant messages to speech

Nine winners scored $10,000, while 20 more winners got $500 prizes. You can check out a list of winner and see all the submissions at the TopCoder contest page.

Digsby, the instant messaging, social networking, email super-tool we first told you about last month launches its public beta today. That means you can sign up without an invitation code. The latest version of the Digsby client also has ton of new features:

• Twitter support
• Audio and video chat through a partnership with ToxBox
• Spell checking
• New "listening to..." status box will automatically update your status with currently playing songs from iTunes or Winamp
• Block contacts by right clicking in the IM window

If you're still not exactly sure what Digsby does, it's basically a single application that lets you communicate with your IM contacts, friends on Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter, or anyone else thanks to email notifications. You can configure Digsby to display a pop up alert every time you receive an email, every time a friend sends a message via Twitter, or every time someone changes their MySpace or Facebook status. You can also see a list of recent updates in each category.

Digsby historically has been a bit of a memory hog compared to lighter weight instant messaging programs like Pidgin. But considering just how many features Digsby has that Pidgin lacks, the memory use doesn't seem excessive.

The application is available for Windows XP and Vista. Mac and Linux clients are in the works.

Look, we know you've already got about two dozen chat clients installed on your computer so you can keep in touch with your contacts using instant messengers from Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL, and other services (seriously haven't you ever heard of Pidgin?) But the latest entry in the instant messaging game is actually worth taking a look at.

Social.im is an instant messaging client that lets you chat with your Facebook contacts. The idea is that while your friends may use any number of different chat clients, there's a good chance they use Facebook. We don't know if that's true, but the first time we ran Social.im 60+ names showed up in our contact list, which is something we can't say for any other new instant messaging service we've ever tried.

What makes Social.im different from all the Facebook applications that let you chat with your contacts is that you don't run Social.im in a web browser window. Rather it's a standalone program that logs into your Facebook account sans web browser. Of course, your friends need to download and install the client before you can chat with them, but Social.im makes it easy to send messages to your friends letting them know about the service. You know, if you want to be that guy.

As a chat client, Social.im is pretty basic. There's no file transfer or image sharing features. There's no voice chat. But the client does include a status bar letting you know if you've received any new Facebook messages, pokes, friend requests, or wall posts since your last login. Clicking on the icons brings up Facebook in a web browser. It would be nice if you could also right click on a contact's name to bring up their page in a web browser, but this is still an early release.

Social.im is available for Windows only at the moment, but a Mac version is coming soon.

[via VentureBeat]

About a month ago Meebo announced they had a new third party development platform. With it, developers can create multi user applications where users can connect to each other. Now the fun starts rolling out, starting with games.

With over 200 registered developers, Meebo has pushed out 20 multiplayer games and made them available for users to play through the online instant messaging platform. Some head to head challenging games include Backgammon, Checkers, Chess, Connect4, Sudoku wars and Texas Hold'em, making the online messaging location even more tempting to use and replace current standard IM's with.

Although gaming is just a start, the next round of Meebo platform categories include shopping, productivity, work applications, music and video.

It looks like Google may be planning some new Gmail features. Many users are already noticing a "newer version" of the Gmail interface with faster page loading and an expanded contact manager. But did you notice that you can choose from a list of instant message services to flesh out our contact profile? Kind of funny, since you can only chat with other Gmail/GTalk users from within the Gmail interface -- or can you?

Ionut Alex Chitu over at Google Operating System took a look at the updated Gmail code and found indications that Google would be adding support for Jabber transports. In other words, you may soon be able to chat with contacts using Yahoo!, MSN, or AOL instant messengers as well as Google Talk and other chat clients from within the Gmail interface.

Chitu also uncovered evidence that you'll be able to add colors to labels, and detach messages from conversations. We have to admit, we were a little underwhelmed with Google's latest facelift, but we're heartened at the thought that the updated contact manager is just the first of many changes coming soon.

Imo.Im is a web based instant messaging service, from former Google employees, that lets you IM your friends from various IM clients, such as AIM, Google Talk, MSN, and Yahoo Messenger. This aggregator service is similar to Meebo and e-buddy.

Now that's all well and good, but they just added video chat to really get the party going. Now you can video chat with your friends using a web cam with just one click via an invite button. You can also do a three way chat with the first two chatters each opening a separate window with the third party.

Another feature sure to be the ultimate party starter, is Imo's group chat, which lets you chat across multiple IM clients, although this feature is still under development.

Imo.Im was launched in April and its creators are fomer employees of Google. It has about 70,000 users.

We're starting to think there's nothing you can't build on top of Mozilla. There's the Firefox web browser, Thunderbird e-mail client, Songbird music player/browser, and now it looks like we've got a Mozilla-based instant messaging client.

Instantbird is still in early beta. But version 0.1 already shows some promise. The application is a multi-client chat program letting you connect to popular instant messaging services including AOL, MSN, and Yahoo!. You know, pretty much like Pidgin. In fact, Instantbird uses libpurple, the same code library used by Pidgin.

Version 0.1 is still pretty buggy, Instantbird has a long road in front of it. The goal for version 1.0? Make a chat client that has all the same features as Pidgin. But beyond that, the developers hope to add voice and video functionality to Instantbird, which would make it a killer multi-protocol messenger application.

Like most things Mozilla, Instantbird comes in Linux, Windows, and Mac varieties. But we don't really recommend compiling it from source on Ubuntu unless you really know what we're doing. We waited over 2 hours for it to compile before getting an error message.

[via Mozilla Links]

You've got friends using AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, and Google's instant messenger clients. You could install four different applications, or you could use a multi-protocol chat client like Pidgin, Miranda, or Trillian.

For mac users, the undisputed champion of multi-chat clients is Adium. Like all things Mac, the program has a cult-following and probably for good reason. It's a robust chat application that works with more than a dozen different chat protocols.

But it's about to get some competition. Cerulean Studios, the company behind Trillian is working on a Mac version of their popular IM client. The Mac version is still in the early alpha testing phase and doesn't have all the features you can find on its Windows cousin. In other words, while you can test it out today, you probably won't feel any urge to stop using Adium. Eventually the developers plan to add features and full-fledged multi-chat client for OS X.

In order to sign up for the Alpha you'll need to sign up for an account using the Windows version of Trillian Astra.

[via tuaw]