Trillian review

We review the iPhone app for the multiprotocol instant messaging service, Trillian. And yes – it’s named after the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy character

Trillian has actually been around for about a decade, when instant messaging was still in its infancy but promised a world of quick and free chatting through the almost-new “interwebnets”, as the digital frontier was known back then.

What’s interesting about this particular service was that it didn’t actually offer a messaging system. Instead, it brought all the other chat systems - which mostly refused to talk to each other as they all raced to with the IM marathon - under a single communications umbrella. Fast forward a few years, and the Trillian iPhone app is doing much the same thing, only from your pocket.

Trillian does actually have its own chat network these days, and it’s a damn popular one since so many people have got fed up of the fragmented nature of text chatting and adopted this great catch-all option. But it still operates as a gateway to the major players in the social networking world.

Microsoft Live Messenger, Facebook Chat, Yahoo, AIM/IMobileMe, Google Talk, ICQ, MySpaceIM, Jabber and Trillian’s own Astra are all included in the app, with a variety of individual and blanket options to effectively blend all the networks into one seamless communications platform.

You can add as many or as few networks to your Trillian list as you want, signing into each one individually the first time, and then letting the app have access thereafter. And to say it’s talking to so many systems at once, Trillian remains impressively stable and quick, and doesn’t seem to struggle when your signal is on the low side.

A universal status and message can be set, which is applied to all your networks in one go, and automatically sets you to “away” whenever the app is minimised or the iPhone turned off.

Your contacts are also kept neat and organized as Trillian works hard to reduce duplicates by filing different network addresses for the same person under a single banner - you can then choose how you want to contact that person simply by tapping their name and revealing all their details.

But it’s not all about combining the chat networks. Trillian keeps your chats open and separate, should you want, by using a browser-esque tab system, so it’s easy to switch between conversations as any time. Push notifications also keep you connected, while photos and other multimedia options are available, depending on the network’s abilities.

Management of so many different networks has never been so simple or so seamless, and you’ll soon stop thinking about your chats as being separate entities and just consider Trillian to be the one-stop-shop for Internet texting.

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