Instantbird is an instant messaging client that allows you to talk to your contacts on all major social networks through a single comfortable user interface. It allows you to add your accounts on all the supported networks, and it is capable of importing your contacts from them all automatically. You can set your online status to available, unavailable or offline, too.
When you run the program for the first time, you are automatically asked to add one of your accounts on any of the supported networks, which you can do easily via the program's wizard, which guides you step by step. Afterwards, you can add more of your accounts with the same simplicity. On the program's main window, you can select whether to show your offline contacts or only those who are available for a conversation. Besides, you can see your online status at all times.
To better the program's functionality, it also supports add-ons and extensions, which allow you to personalize Instantbird in many ways. You can download a large number of them freely from Instantbird's website, and install them on the program. There are add-ons to add emoticons to your messages, to sort your contacts by status, and to get a notification when a contact changes his status, just to mention a few. There are also some themes you can download and install to change the program's look and feel.
To sum up, Instantbird is a versatile program that will certainly be very helpful to any person talking to their contacts very frequently, especially if they belong to different social networks.
v1.0 [Jun 28, 2011]
Redesigned contacts window:
Contact merging: If you talk to the same person on multiple IM networks, you can now combine that person's usernames from each network into a single contact. When opening a new chat, the username that is online will be chosen automatically and the conversation window will automatically switch to the applicable username if they switch to a different IM network.
Tags: Tags will be used to replace the groups in the buddy list. Tags can be hidden by clicking the "x" on the right side of the buddy list, all buddies from this tag will go into an "Other Contacts" tag automatically, which is shown at the bottom of the buddy list.
The contacts window can now be ...
closed on Mac without quitting Instantbird; it can be reopened from the Dock.
minimized to tray on Windows and Linux. By default close (hitting the 'x') on the buddy list will minimize to tray, this can be changed in the preferences.
Users can now set their buddy icon and the display name of their accounts right on the contacts list.
The contact list is sorted alphabetically (both groups and contacts appear sorted).
Nicer animations.
Twitter support: When the twitter account is connected, a timeline conversation automatically opens. If the conversation is closed by the user, it's reopened automatically when new messages arrive. The user should disconnect the account from the account manager to prevent new messages from being displayed.
There's a "track" advanced option that allows to specify keywords to track. This is a comma separated list of keywords. Comma means OR, space inside a keyword means AND.
New information toolbar at the top of the conversation UI, showing the buddy icon, display name and current status of your contact. In addition, you can change the IM network you're using for the conversation by clicking on the protocol icon.
