Cerulean Studios appears to have a better working relationship with AIM and Yahoo IM today. However, these outages were short-lived, and a simple upgrade to the latest version of Trillian Pro 2.012 often resolved the matter. In the past, Trillian has experienced outages when Yahoo or AIM have blocked its service. Nor will you need to remember which service a particular buddy belongs to-another big plus. No Web search or download is necessary, and there's no new program to learn.

The estimated time for setting up a new service account is less than five minutes. If you get a new chat buddy who uses a service you don't currently subscribe to, it's a breeze to set up a new account: Click the Connection Manager at the bottom of the Trillian Pro 2.012 console, then the New button to subscribe to a new service. Once set up, the Trillian Pro 2.012 client lists all of your online buddies alphabetically in a single console, with a colored dot next to their names indicating which service they belong to: orange for AIM, green for ICQ, gray for IRC, blue for MSN, and red for Yahoo. Using PayPal, we bought Trillian Pro 2.012 at Cerulean's site, and within 30 seconds, Cerulean Studios sent us a download address and login information. While Cerulean Studios offers a stripped-down, freebie version (you can download Trillian 0.74 from CNET ), the paid version, Trillian Pro 2.012, gives you greater customization options and nifty business-related plug-ins that are well worth the low $25 cost. That's why Cerulean Studios' Trillian Pro 2.012 is a godsend: for a small fee, this program collects all the major IM apps under one easy-to-use interface. If phone companies worked the way today's chat apps do, you'd have to set up accounts with MCI, AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint to talk to your friends and family. The trouble with instant-messaging (IM) apps is that they simply don't play well with one another.

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