Trillian
AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo in one window — and AOL hated it. Trillian was the power user's messenger, locked in a patch-versus-block war with the biggest network of the IM era.
Cerulean Studios released Trillian on July 1, 2000, as a freeware IRC client named for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy character. It soon did something genuinely subversive: it connected to AIM, ICQ, and MSN Messenger simultaneously in one window, with Yahoo and IRC support close behind — one contact list instead of four clients fighting over your taskbar.
AOL noticed. On January 28, 2002, it blocked Trillian's access to AIM; Cerulean patched around the block within days, AOL blocked again, and the skirmishes settled into a running cat-and-mouse game the small developer kept refusing to lose. On September 9, 2002, Cerulean released a commercial version, Trillian Pro 1.0, at $25 a year.
Trillian never won the IM wars — nobody did; the networks it stitched together died one by one. But it outlived nearly all of them, and it is still quietly maintained today: a survivor from an era when your buddy list was your social network.
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