Cerulean Studios has announced that the newest version of Trillian, Trillian Astra, is in alpha testing. Where the other versions of Trillian brought together all of my chat to one place, Astra is aimed at bridging the gap in controlling and managing your entire online presence on multiple blogs, photo sharing, RSS feeds, and almost any other web service. Taking these independent services and weaving them together to create an always updated interdependent web presence is a lofty goal, and Trillian aims to make that happen with Astra.

The new Trillian widget architecture uses Flash presentation and XML data to export data to other web sites and the contact list. Things like location, current weather, current mood, time zone, CPU usage, mp3 playlists, and your contact list can all be shared. There are advanced permissions lists for creating rules restricting what type of data users can see. Basically, I can define rules to share my phone number and address only to people in my family list, but the family won't be able to see what I'm downloading over BitTorrent.

There have also been several maintenance issues reworked from the ground up. Update and redraw times have been greatly improved, and this should finally fix the intermittent 100% processor usage issues of past releases. They've been plugging all the memory leaks, and streamlining the skinning engine by reducing the amount of XML it takes to write a skin. Custom skins should load faster, and there will be ultra minimalist skins available for using Trillian on older machines.

Where Pro has nonexistent support for letting visiting friends log in with their own credentials, Astra has a proper shared login screen. The SecureIM encryption engine has been updated to support public key architecture. It's a little known fact that Trillian Pro already seamlessly integrates with PGP desktop.

There's a Flash tour of the new features, and an in-depth sneak preview of all the improvements, and a full changelog for all the hardcore geeks.