Instantbird

The Internet has brought about many new communication methods. Amongst others, instant messaging is now available on various devices and lets you quickly get in touch with relatives or business associates from around the world. With this in mind, Instantbird comes as a powerful means of connecting to your preferred protocol and start chatting.

Running the application brings up an accounts manager that aims to quickly take you through the process of adding profiles and credentials. The application can pride itself with an impressive amount of supported protocols, amongst which you find Facebook, Netsoul, QQ, Twitter, XMPP, Yahoo and several others.

Most importantly, you can stay simultaneously connected to more accounts, and this option comes in handy especially for businesses where communication is a daily routine. There's also a portable version so you can configure your profiles and use them wherever there's an active Internet connection.

The overall design is kept simple, with a large contacts list that only displays name of online individuals. You can create custom groups and collapse only the ones you frequently use. Moreover, you can configure notifications, with the possibility to set up sound, as well as flickering taskbar icons for new events.

The instant messaging window supports multiple tabs, and can be customized and filled with as many entries as you can chat with. Helpful info displays date and time related text. In terms of personalizing your account, pictures and status messages can be edited with the help of dedicated functions.

Customization is yet another rich feature the application comes equipped with. Accessing the settings menu gives you the possibility to fully configure the visual aspect of your messages, whether or not, and how to receive notifications, and even an option to customize shortcuts to trigger emoticons.

Instantbird manages to live up to expectations by providing a fully customizable environment with support for multiple, simultaneously active instant messaging accounts so you can get in touch with people all around the world how and when you want. It can even be used on the go, since there's also a portable version up for download.