Roll back the clock ten years and there were three major messaging systems; AOL, MSN and Yahoo. Running a separate client for each system was a real hassle and took up a lot of computer resources. Along came Skype and there was another messaging system and yet another piece of software to run. Now we have Facebook, Twitter and other social outlets.

During the whole time span, I’ve been running Trillian and it has evolved with me to support the new messaging systems as they’ve become popular. The nice thing is that you only have to run one piece of software and it can include any of the accounts to allow you to text message all the way to doing video calls. It is very compact on your screen as shown in the photo above right. There is a free version that does is enough for some users and there is a pro version that has a small cost. Mac and PC versions are both available as as free apps for Android, Blackberry and iOS. That means nearly every device has a version of Trillian available. This is one of my favorite utilities and I don’t know how I could communicate with all of my contacts without it.