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.
v1.1 [Oct 21, 2011]
- In addition to several stability fixes and a dramatic reduction of resource consumption in some cases, this new release will make Twitter and IRC much more usable in Instantbird:
- On Twitter, it’s now possible from the context menu to retweet, to reply to a tweet (or simply double click on the tweet to start a reply). The context menu also lets you follow or unfollow the author of the tweet.
- Tab completion of usernames (starting with an @ character on twitter) or nicknames (in IRC channels) will also be very appreciated.
- All these changes have been commonly requested, so no surprise here. But there’s one last feature I would like to talk about before offering you a download link: Instantbird 1.1 brings support for putting conversation on hold. This means you can now close conversation tabs without leaving the conversation, the conversation will sit at the top of the Contacts window until you reopen it or someone talks to you. While this may seem like a small change, it’s exceptionally useful for IRC users who tend to idle in lots of channels because they want to “be there just in case” but don’t interact much with the conversation.
