Trillian 4.1 beta for Windows opens up

Trillain 4.1 beta for Windows amps Twitter and Facebook power.

(Credit: Cerulean Studios)

Makers of the multinetwork chat application Trillian threw open doors to the company's latest beta, previously available onto to private beta testers, allowing any Windows user to test Trillian 4.1 beta before the code becomes final.

Chief among the changes in the beta are new social networking features and tight integration with Windows 7 for users of Microsoft's most recent operating system. Trillian 4.1 beta supports story links and avatar pictures in more locations on the interface, as well as Twitter hash tags and direct (@) replies. You can now also tweet from the contact list, follow and unfollow users, and edit a message before you retweet. Here's the full list of changes for Twitter and Facebook users.

Although the current stable version, Trillian Astra 4.0, works fine in Windows 7, the beta brings on optimizations, like support for jump lists, and an animated progress bar that displays during file transfers (see all new features).

Trillian 4.1 beta for Windows also gets an overhaul in the e-mail notifications department, with six additional features that span new views in which to organize your messages, to new things you can do with notification messages, like toggling through alerts and shoving them into any corner of the screen. The ability to manage incoming messages from the right-click context menu looks especially convenient.

Read more about Trillian 4.1 beta's e-mail enhancements, and a few extra tweaks to status control. Beta users should be forewarned that since 4.1 is still in the development process, you may run across some bugs and instability.

Trillian faces heavy competition from all-in-one chat clients like Digsby, which also incorporates Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail notifications into its communications application. Giving Trillian greater social networking capabilities will help keep Cerulean Studios' instant messenger competitive.