The new release of this powerful chat/social networking application is surprisingly simple to use. Trillian 5 provides a centralized location where you can track new messages from email clients (potentially replaces Google Mail Notifier), and connect to various social networks.

In order to use Trillian, you need to register for an account and then add your personal accounts to the application. The listing of possible accounts you can have on the Trillian application can be seen in the screen shot below:

I noticed that Trillian 5 is very quick to synchronize new messages, statuses and twitter feeds. As a matter of fact, it feels instantaneous. You can post an update to Facebook, and tweet directly from the application, check LinkedIn updates, and the list goes on.

A nice feature is bieng able to set your global status for all accounts in just a click of the mouse. You can also check out the entire activity history, which archives the following events narrowed by a date parameter:

So tracking is very easy and useful, especially if you're permitted to use chat clients at work.

Although the preferences dialogue has a handy search box on top to get you started, I did find it to be cluttered and not intuitive in order to find what you're looking for from the get-go. There's also this big orange panel nudging you to upgrade to Trillian Pro. Click here to see a comparison between the Pro version and the free version of Trillian.

Apart from that "irritation", I believe that in the grand scheme this application is extremely sleek and simple. You can set the level of detail in your contacts window and chose where you would like to be notified for new events.

Only the default skin is provided for the application, and I wasn't too crazy about that because I would have liked to have at least another to choose from without fetching it. Also, adding new skins is not straight forward, so I think this is just something that will exist temporarily for the beta version. Perhaps in the official release they will have easier ways to change the skin.

The help section is very limited to free users, and is just a collection of steps on how to retrieve your lost password. I've not been able to find any GUI instructions or guides to set up different accounts. As straight forward as it may very well be, I still strongly believe that every application should provide a walk through of such things.

The standard functionality are available in Trillian 5, so I won't really go into them in detail to avoid being redundant. But what sets this chat application apart from the others is that it's powerful, reliable and sleek.

Before this I used to use Digsby, but I've decided to switch since the contact list shows a higher level of detail and wins when it comes to accessibility.

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