AOL AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger, watch out. There's a new IM sheriff in town -- one that crosses into all of your jurisdictions.
Trillian is one of a breed of cross-platform IM clients -- in other words, it'll hook you up to all of the major public IM networks. The advantage here is that users don't need to keep separate IM windows open to communicate with friends who may not be all on one network.
Trillian is immensely popular, too. Just this week, Jupiter Media Metrix said Trillian appeared for the first time in February 2002 in the Media Metrix Internet audience ratings with 344,000 unique users and has grown 77 percent to 610,000 as of April 2002. While this is small potatoes compared to the major networks, Trillian has consistently ranked highest according to the number of average minutes spent per month.
A wide potential audience exists for a Trillian-type of product, too, as the number of people who use multiple instant-messaging applications has been increasing. In September 2001, 29% of IM users at home used at least two competing brands, up from 24% in September 2000. At work, 23% of messaging users used at least two competing brands, up from 18% in September 2000.
The increase can be attributed to a combination of wanting/needing to be connected to family, friends and colleagues, as well as inoperability among the major public IM nets.
In this review, we'll take a look at Trillian as an enterprise IM application.
When I last spoke with Cerulean Studios' Scott Werndorfer -- he and his partner developed Trillian a few years back -- he said that bringing a client/server version of the software to the enterprise market is a real possibility. That's good news for companies that not only want to use an IM client to communicate internally, but need to "talk" with consumers, suppliers, customers and even consultants as well.
Until then, you can use the current version of the client that runs on all of the major public IM networks: America Online's AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), ICQ (owned by AOL), MSN Messenger from Microsoft and Yahoo Messenger. The client also runs on the tried-and-true IRC (Internet-Relay Chat).
The client itself is very nice. Besides the obvious plus of multi-network accessibility, it has most of the features you'll find in any of the popular clients. The program is designed for the consumer market, with its cool-looking and skinnable interface (a-la Winamp), its emoticons and emotisounds.
The program is ideal, though, for employees of companies who want to keep in touch with suppliers or customers via IM, yet they don't have an employer-supported way to send and receive messages. As long as their bosses don't block out the use of IM on the company's network, workers can use Trillian about as easily as any one of the popular public IM net clients out there.
Trillian also has two features that address security. Messaging between two people using Trillian on ICQ or AIM is encrypted, but both people have to use Trillian for the encryption to work. Also, Trillian keeps a log of conversations a user has had with another person, through its "Message History" option. This feature works on any of the services supported by Trillian.
Right now, Trillian is free for non-commercial use, and is aimed primarily at the consumer market. Cerulean Studios, which developed Trillian, does ask for donations from individuals to help support development and Web server costs. Payments can be made via PayPal and Amazon.com's Honor System.
All in all, Trillian is a very good client to use -- as long as you don't object to how it uses the AIM network. Much has been made recently of AOL's attempted blocking of Trillian users onto the AIM backbone. AOL says it wants to keep Trillian users off because of security reasons. Cerulean Studios responds by issuing new versions of Trillian that work around AOL's cyberblocks.
Whether Trillian is right to do this or not is a subject that's being hotly debated elsewhere. One thing's for sure, though -- there's a need for software like this. After all, there's very few people out there who like to use their PC's resources to keep multiple IM windows open so they can chat with friends who are on more than one IM net.
While Trillian's access to AIM is seen as a big advantage, its usefulness can be struck down again if AOL decides to go tit for tat in blocking Trillian users once again. So it is definitely a case of caveat emptor for Trillian users if they depend heavily on AIM.
Bob Woods is the managing editor of InstantMessagingPlanet.
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