Trillian Astra is an instant messaging service that has a twist: it lets you combine all your friends from several messengers on a single interface, so only one application will be opened when you want to talk to everyone on your lists.
This software imports all the contacts of your selected instant messaging platforms (Windows Live Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, Skype), but it can also directly access social networks (Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, LinkedIn).
In addition, Trillian has borrowed most of the important features from other messengers that you like so much, and added new ones.
You can open a new window and chat, or send a quick message to a friend who has just signed in.
Friends can be sorted in the list in various ways (e.g. alphabetically, by conversation history size), but also "resized" on Trillian's interface (e.g. large, medium, small).
When you talk to a friend, you can insert a screen capture (by clicking and dragging the mouse), flag text as important (i.e. yellow text with red highlights), or change font to code style (which is especially useful if you're trying to explain a programming language to someone).
There are tons of emoticons you can play with (smiley faces, objects and symbols), and some of them are compatible with both Yahoo and MSN Messenger.
The chat history is better organized than in typical instant messengers, because here you can actually select a date from the calendar to view a conversation, as well as view any images exchanged between you and your friends.
Trillian supports several languages and uses minimal memory resources (a true improvement, when you think about the messengers you typically use).
We haven't found anything wrong with this instant messaging tool, and we highly recommend you test it for yourself. It's free, and it has a bit of everything!

What's New in This Release:
Native spellcheck integration:
· Our message windows and social windows will now make sure you’re not making any mistakes when you type! Auto-correct optional.
Better Windows 7 support:
· We now have the ability to split tabbed chats into their individual windows in the taskbar and have also added some great new jumplist features. Of course, these all work on the new Windows 8 too!
Twitter upgrades:
· Although we’ve always supported both native retweets and the older-style retweets, the option was buried in a preference. We’ve taken the time to tidy things up a bit and now expose both methods directly in the right click menu. You can also now follow conversations right inside of Trillian, among other improvements.
· As always, we’ve also taken the opportunity to fix a giant chunk of bugs in this release, bringing improved performance and stability to the product.

Users are advised to pay attention while installing this ad-supported application:
· Offers to download or install software or components (Ask Toolbar, Xobni) that the program does not require to fully function
· Attempts to change the default search engine for web browsers installed on the system
· Displays ad banners or other types of advertising material during its runtime