Trillian Astra adds social networking to user profiles

If you're a Trillian Astra alpha tester, the newest build launched this weekend now has a clean and simple profile building tool. You can add a slew of Web services to your personal profile for others to see, including Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Last.fm, and even your LinkedIn account. There are 13 in all, along with quick links to add your blog or personal Web site. The result is effectively a pretty looking link dump to all your online personas and services that others will see when they look at your profile. More importantly, however, it's the beginning of some integration with other Web services that could help differentiate Trillian from emerging Web competitors like Meebo. Whether they plan to take it as far as Flock has with its latest release is anyone's guess.

The new feature reminds me a little bit of AirTalkr, which we took a look at last month. That service employs a similar idea, although it will actually go through the effort of searching for matches by name and e-mail address on various services, taking a step away from the end user. It's something I hope Trillian borrows.

Trillian Astra is still in private alpha, with no word yet on an eventual release date, although if you're a paying pro member of version 3, you can get into the beta by signing up on the alpha sign-up page. In the meantime, since our last coverage, the service has added an auto-updater, a plug-in for MySpace's IM protocol, and launched the iPhone and Web versions of its client.