I’ve been a user of Trillian for a long time now, but as time passes I have become increasingly frustrated with it. For those of you who don’t know, Trillian is a multiple protocol instant messaging program (e.g. it allows you to connect to several instant messaging services in one program).

Before I continue, let me explain, I am a Trillian Pro user, which means I pay for the software on an annual basis, which unlocks Trillian’s plug-in abilities, enhanced features and enhanced compatibility with video and audio features of each client (supposedly) which should enrichen my instant messaging experience.

Yet being mainly a Microsoft Messenger user, the one thing that immediately disappointed me was the fact that the compatibility of it’s video and audio features were far below par, with the only means to getting it working was using video conferencing, which means, audio and video had to be sent by both parties in the conversation. Whereas in the official client you can just send video on its own, without the user requiring to send video back and audio is not needed to be activated. Even through the video conferencing mode there were numerous problems with compatibility and Trillian crashing, so I had to immediately drop any plans to use video / audio features of Microsoft Messenger in Trillian…

So having figured out part of the cost of Trillian was unjustified, I stumbled across another problem when I upgraded to Trillian 3.01 that wasn’t present in previous versions. It seemed that my Microsoft Messenger contacts’ personal names were not being updated properly, but stuck on old or previously used personal names. I submitted several bug reports with Trillian about the issue, and still a year or so later the bug is still present… Sure, its not a protocol critical error but an annoying one none the less! With the introduction of MSN Messenger 7.5 (Released after Trillian build 3.01), came the introduction of new features in the protocol for Microsoft Messenger, which entail, nudges, winks, custom emotes & Personal Status Messages all of which are not available in Trillian.

Yet, this all stems down to one major problem with Trillian… and that is, it has not been updated for over a year and a half, thus meaning that any protocol changes and new features that have been brought into each respective service is not available, and indeed has broken some of the other compatibilities that Trillian offered when the last build was released. Considering I pay for the program, as you can imagine this has left me baffled as to why I bother, when GAIM which is totally free can do most of what Trillian can do at it’s current state anyway?

On March 7th of this year (2006), in the official Trillian Blog, Scott Werndorfe announced they are working a new version of Trillian, that was 4 months ago, and still to this day we haven’t heard much about the new version nor how Trillian plans to answer their critics. From the minimal two screen shots we have seen the supposedly “new” Trillian doesn’t look anything different from the current Trillian bar a couple of GUI tweaks, but what of compatibility of the new clients… I guess only time will tell, as Trillian has a strict policy not to reveal any feature specific information, but with no release date, nor no hint as to when it’ll be released, just put it this way… I’m not holding my breath.

So I’ve reached a fork in the road, do I switch over to GAIM for all my accounts apart from Microsoft Messenger and then use the official Windows Live Messenger as its the main account that I use? Or do I hold on and wait for Trillian to see what they got up their sleeve and stick with a below par IM client? Well to be honest It’s going to be a bit of both, I’ll continue to use Trillian for my other accounts but I’ll use Microsoft’s client for their protocol as I’m getting tired of what I can’t do with Trillian and I’m tired of holding my breath for something that may be months away from materialising.

Don’t get me wrong however, Windows Live Messenger (WLM) has its flaws & it’s bugs, in fact as I’m writing this it seems the WLM team are experiencing problems with their servers / new client after the recent activation of the Yahoo! Messenger & Microsoft Messenger interoperability as admitted from their very own blog, which I seem to be experiencing as well especially with one of my accounts. But even so, they’ll probably fix that particular problem in the next 24 hours, rather than the next year, and its that difference that has made my mind up to use the official client, not only do I get all the features working as they should, but if something goes wrong then its definitely down to Microsoft and not the software I am using, which is a much better situation being in, then having software that the original software developers seem to have stopped working on / fixing.

But also take into consideration, with this new interoperability between Microsoft and Yahoo! now being live, what is coming next? is it going to be that eventually all the clients will be able to talk to each other? If so, there wont be a need for Trillian any longer, and so all that wasted breath would have been for nothing… So for now, I’m saying goodbye to Trillian when it comes to Microsoft messenger and hello Windows Live Messenger… at least until Trillian shows me something worth coming back to…