Adium's Zac West posted screenshots to the official blog and the implementation looks great. The plan was announced this weekend but just now noticed by The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

Many people will want to track certain search terms of tags on Twitter in Adium and West says he's hoping that will be possible soon. He has also said that drag and drop upload of images to Twitpic is another goal.

We hope that the controls on new message receipts will be granular enough that Twitter by Adium won't be annoying for heavy Twitter users. We presume that having all your Twitter friends as contacts will make it easy to create groups in Adium as well. Groups in Twitter is one of the keys to effective use of the service.

We hate to keep writing about Twitter here, but we do use the service all day long and there's a reason that so many developers are focused on it. You can follow me on Twitter at Marshallk and the whole ReadWriteWeb crew at ReadWriteWeb. Thanks to Chris Messina for catching this news and bringing it to our attention on Twitter.

This incredibly customizable program lets you chat seamlessly across almost every IM network you can think of - the absence of interoperability becomes almost inconsequential after you sign up for an account on each service and tell Adium to log in to each. We are very excited about the upgrade.

Facebook Integration

We're not sure how likely to use Facebook chat we are, but we know that a lot of people do use it. We'll now be reachable that way too. By telling Adium to connect to social networking status messages, we're also now seeing peoples' Facebook status in Growl notification. That's pretty nice. Not something we'd want for Twitter, but for the less frequently updated Facebook messages that makes sense.

Effective interoperability with Facebook IM makes us think we should take our friend accepting a little more seriously there. Unfortunately, one known issue is that Facebook doesn't want to keep you logged in when you're also logged in via Adium. We hope that can be solved quickly.

Search

One of the most frustrating things about Adium has been that by tying together contacts lists across multiple services, it creates a very long aggregate list. It can be hard to find anyone in particular when you want to initiate a chat. No longer! The new version of Adium solves this UI scaling problem by bringing up a nice search bar when you hit the command-F keys.

There's So Much to Do With Adium!

Seven months in the making, this update to Adium is a big one. There's sure to be more on the way soon (many people are hoping that video and audio chat will be enabled someday) but in the meantime, check out AdiumXtras, the site where you can find all kinds of skins, plug-ins and other Adium fun.