I have previously chatted with several people who use Trillian. They think it’s wonderful and rave about it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get into any discussions with any of them about: “What exactly is so great about Trillian?” The closest I came to such, was when one user said, “I don’t have to have a bunch of s**t cluttering up my desktop.”
I have never used Trillian. Frankly, at this point, I have no interest in using it, despite the fact that I heavily use AIM, MSN, & Yahoo Messenger. (Why I have no interest in Trillian, is likely a matter for GD. I prefer to avoid that.)
I’m assuming there are likely some Trillian-ites here. Therefore, I pose the question to you: "What exactly is so great about Trillian?"
I use Trillian, for exactly the reason you describe: not as much &^%%# cluttering up my desktop.
Seriously, I have threre different IM accounts on three different services, and it’s so much easier to have just one program that logs in to all three services and presents all my contacts in the same place. It simply leads to a lot less confusion .
To me, the advantage to Trillian is that I don’t have to have multiple IM clients running at the same time, taking up 3-4x the system resources, etc. I have a stable common interface for all my IM contacts.
Out of curiosity, how much does it slow down the booting up of your computer? When I was at my old company, we had our own internal IM. At my old company, my cpu was slow to boot only because of all the extra security features on my cpu. When I changed jobs, my cpu booted super fast, like 30-60 secs. Ever since I loaded MSM IM, by boot up times have dragged to like 3-4 minutes (I go to the bathroom or get water and it’s still booting up). MSM IM is annoying slowing down my cpu enough to the point where I want to delete it from my system.
I like the encryption options, too.
Also, like the others have said, you can replace three or four or five crashy programs (some featuring ads: [del]Yay![/del]) with a single, streamlined app.
Also, there’s something to be said about using an independent, underdog delevoper’s software rather than that of a mega-corporation.
I have friends on all four major IM services. I like having the same interface for all of them. (I don’t actually use Trillian, I use Adium on the Mac, but same idea.)
The answer is rather self-evident. If, as you say, you heavily use AIM, MSN, & Yahoo! Messenger, you know what a pain in the ass it is to keep clicking from one messenger to the next to the next. It’s enough to drive a man crazy. Why wouldn’t you use a program (not necessarily Trillian, just any of this type of program) that consolidates all your messengers into one?
Add to that, it eliminates a lot of extraneous garbage the proprietary messengers use. It’s a bit like tabbed browsing. Is it easier to manage one window with tabs, or a gazillion windows strewn about your desktop or program bar. I vote the former.
One reason to use Trillian: Having an obscure conversation on a topic you know nothing about has never been easier than hovering over a word and having the Wikipedia article immediately pop up.
One reason not to use Trillian: It is a memory whore and has had a nasty cpu leak associated with it’s heavy-duty logging format for years. You may not encounter this if you are a casual user.
I switched when AIM started loading all the spyware into it’s installer. I should have switched when they started leaving ads for Netscape and AOL all over my desktop and start menu.
I’m having a similar issue right now with the Adobe Acrobat Reader auto-updater that has a greyed-out, checked checkbox indicating that I apparently want the Yahoo toolbar installed, too.
Note to software developers: If I want utterly unrelated software installed (toolbars, Wild Tangent, “GameSpy,” Netscape, or whatever), I’ll download and install it myself. I will not install it as part of something else. If you don’t give me the option to install your software without this junk, then I won’t install your software.
Well then… Trillian isn’t for you then, is it? Most people would prefer having one cell phone that EVERYONE can call instead of one cell phone for Verizon folks, another for Cingular folks, another for Sprint folks, etc. You seem a) happy to carry around 5 cell phones; and 2) mystified that some people would only want one phone. I’m not sure that I’m following your logic there.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not a huge Trillian fan myself… mainly because I use AIM exculsively. Trillian is just overkill for me. I prefer using an older AIM client with DeadAIM myself.
I’ve used Trillian for 3 or 4 years now, but I recently (i.e. two days ago) switched to Gaim and I’m giving it a shot.
Both of these services let you sign on to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Jabber, IRC, and a few others (gaim has Gadu Gadu, for instance). This is the main reason I use Trilian/Gaim, since I have friends who only use AIM, or only use Yahoo, or whatever.
I’ve gotten annoyed with Trillian because there seems to be more bloat each time they release an upgrade. Plus, some features have never worked properly or consistently for me. Even with my Trillian Pro, file transfers would work with friend A on AIM, but not friend B on AIM and they’d never work on MSN or Yahoo. Plug ins to view links in profiles never worked for me either. Also, if I wanted to change my font color, it never saved the preference, ever.
Gaim seems neat since I can have tabbed chat windows (which is weird to get used to, even though I’ve been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix and you had to manually install the browser). There are a few things that irk me but the problems that I had with Trillian are gone, so I’m satisfied. I tried Miranda and it wouldn’t connect to AIM, even after I installed the patches.
So anyway: Why Trillian? Because it offers connectivity to multiple chat programs and is the most popular and prettified. Gaim is more streamlined but I haven’t found very attractive skins (though if anyone knows of any, show me!). People like pretty.
I tried the free Trillian deal over the summer, but switched back to AIM. As cool as the Wikipedia links were I hated not being able to click on buddy’s links in their away messages and profiles. I only use AIM so I guess the multiple programs at once thing never appealed to me.
Big deal. She’ll still be back on the dole queue on Monday morning.
I use Trillian, or did until corporate shut down the proxy that we were using for IM. It’s stable and has some nice features, but I prefer gaim at home on the Linux and Darwin boxes.
