Expansion and consolidation. It’s the cycle of history. New technology breeds new services by the dozen. Then, when those services become too numerous to handle we see consolidation. In the past that meant some businesses would not see tomorrow. But now, with mobile technology creating new markets, we’re seeing third parties supply the consolidation. On the BlackBerry we’ve seen this with apps like IM+. That one consolidates all of your IM accounts. Recently I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about Trillian, which takes consolidation one step further by combining not only instant messaging services, but also social networking.
Integration is the key with Trillian. It combines your address book with your contact list on various IM and social networking services, creating one interface for communication. For BlackBerry this currently includes Astra, MSN, Facebook Chat, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ, MySpace, and Jabber. As you can see in the screenshot, Trillian organizes your contacts so you can message them from any of those platforms.
There should be more services coming soon, too. As you can see on Trillian’s about page, they plan on adding services like Twitter, Skype, and others in due time. This is only going to help the platform grow. The more integrated services the better. Even better, you can get their desktop client for Windows or Mac.
One of these days RIM will provide native integration of all these services. They’ve already taken a step in that direction with Social Feeds in OS 6. But until then we’ll have third party apps like Trillian to fill the void. This one is fresh out of beta and ready for your consumption. You can get Trillian for $4.99 from App World. I’m not sure if they’re serious about it, but it sounds like this is just an introductory price, so you might want to jump on it.
