I will agree with Drakino that Trillian is a great IM client. However, I have one major warning for you:

AOL keeps finding ways to block Trillian clients. Their last round of ECMs had the Trillian developers scrambling to fix it, and we were offline for a while. Things are stable now, but I don't know how long they will continue to be that way.

So if you only have AIM buddies, and don't need to be on more than one IM network at the same time, then don't bother using Trillian, stick with AIM.

But if you want to be on all of these IM systems all at the same time, then by all means, use Trillian, it rocks. I personally use it for ICQ (primary usage), one or two AIM buddies (secondary usage), and once in a while, IRC. It's really great having all of that in the same user interface.

Even with the recent AOL problems, I'd still recommend Trillian. Sure, keep AIM around if you are unconfortable with loosing connection, but I've run Trillian since July of last year, and have only been off AIM for a week. Not too bad considering AOL (huge base of programmers) was trying hard for a few weeks to knock Trillian (2 developers) off. Plus the next major revision will probably support falling back to the open network AOL runs. You will loose the advanced fluffy features if Trillian ever has to back down to the other network, but you can still chat. (Keep in mind I have no confirmed reports of this, nor the exact time frame this would appear).

I honestly found Trillian worth supporting. I'll probably be donating a second time, just due to all the awesome features added since 0.651 when I last donated.

And once you do load Trillian, feel free to start migrating to the other networks. Another advantage is that if you get your core friends to switch as well, you are no longer dependant on one network. Most are stable right now, but who knows what might be around the corner waiting to kill a network for a few days (Like the problems MSN had a while back, or ICQ months before that).

To me, telling someone to stay with AIM is like saying to stay with the 1.03 software on the empeg without ever trying 2.0. The difference is amazing in both cases.

Okay, okay, point taken.

I wonder... It seems like the AOL people were hell-bent on killing Trillian for a while, but I haven't seen a new ECM since the last Trillian fix.

I wonder if Trillian has finally reached the point where the AOL people can't tell the difference between a Trillian client and a genuine AIM client? We can only hope.

So I have a question. When I'm on Trillian, I'm merely seen to people who use any of the other networks as a user of that network, right?

Does Trillian have any plans to make their own network?

And I really wouldn't try to get any of my friends to switch over to other networks. ICQ always bugged the hell out of me. I hated that whole program and found it completely annoying. Call me simple minded, but I like the straight-forward system of AIM. That's just my preference. And don't get me started on IRC. I tried that for a few hours and nearly shot myself in the head. I don't know why anyone would want to go through with that every day

Anyway, I wouldn't want to convince all my friends to switch over. Then who would be left on the original networks?

Yes, Trillian sees every network as seperate ones. The contact list has little icons indicating what network they are on, and each chat window also has the same icons.

Trillian has no plans that I know of to make their own network. Jabber does that, but I don't see how you can follow a mission of IM interopibility by adding yet another network. The Trillian method is a good first step. Even MS thinks so, as they tried to add AIM to their client a while back.

I hated the ICQ program, yes, but not the network so much. Offline messaging is awesome. And it has better support for different away modes and such. Just not as much fluff like AIM with buddy icons. And IRC is more of a chatroom setting. It has it's use, and I am in it daily linked with many other coworkers.

And on the friends switchover part, just convince them to get Trillian. You can still chat to them on the AIM network. One thing to get used to is having one person on multiple networks. Right now I have a redundant folder that contains a mirror folder structure of my main list, and contains all the redundant contacts I have. In the future, Trillian will also add a "Trillian Contact". Basicially it's a way of saying "JoBob1233" on AIM is the same as "92938383" on ICQ. Then they show up as online whenever at least one of their connections is working.

Does Trillian have any plans to make their own network?

Not that I know of.

Odigo did that (or tried to). They basically did the same thing as Trillian, make a client that talks on multiple networks, but in their case they also had their own Odigo network.

I eventually switched from Odigo to Trillian because the Trillian software is better and they are quicker about responding to AOL's ECMs. Haven't looked back, I wonder how the Odigo people are doing these days?

Still using the Odigo3 skin on my Trillian client, though.

I agree with everything you are saying about Trillian.
I convinced at least two of my main contacts to switch to Trilliam from only using AIM.
I was only using AIM to talk to them. I think ICQ was much better. Mainly the Offline Messaging and Multiple Away Modes. I convinced them to switch for like four seconds from AIM to ICQ. but they hated it and they didn't have any of their contacts. I guess it depends on what you learned on though. I was spoiled. Using the first IM program when it was first starting. I still remember when someone told me about it. "Hey, there's this cool ICQ thing where you can email people, but the get it right away, and you can see when they are online and stuff. It's fun!"

Another feature of ICQ I loved was being able to appear offline to other users, I used that constently.

Yep, I remember that "instant e-mail" remark. Odd thing was that a few years earlier, I was using instant e-mail. I carried on an entire conversation with someone via Pine when they replied to a news posting I had made.

Alas, even on my own server, mail isn't instant due to the massive procmail files I have to get rid of spam.

The only problem I ever had with messenger was trying to uninstall it.... even after altering the sysoc.ini file I still got no option to uninstall... after digging around found that you have to enter some retarded command line option to get rid of it.... Thanks Microsoft...

Hey, Zephyr existed long before ICQ did, and I used it all the time over ten years ago, and it wasn't brand new then, either. It just didn't have a global server; it was a site-installed thing, but when your site is a major university, it's very similar.

Honestly, I found the port number by looking in the MSN preferences for Trillian. And since I've never had nor ever will have an MSN account, I figured I'd never even looked at it before, much less changed it, so it seemed like an accurate source.

Hey hey, I believe you!
How you got the trigger number makes no difference to me, the most important bit is that it WORKED!

Thanks again!