Now, at least one team - the minds behind BabelWith.me - has developed the functionality into a cool, useful chat application that capably (if not perfectly) translates chats in real time. The service enables simultaneous communication in up to 45 different languages. It's kind of like the U.N. of IM.

The chat dialog shows both the original text as well as the Google-powered translation. Granted, the translations aren't perfect; Google doesn't know how to deal with "pig latin" or "pommes frites." But it's manageable and functional, for the most part.

We tested it out and do wish the program had a timestamp feature and some kind of notification or alert. Unnoticed chats went ignored with nary a flash, blink, or beep until we came back to the window or tab containing the chat room. We did love that the program gave both the original text (in orange italics) underneath the translated version. And of course, all the static text in the chat is translated, as well.

We were also told by the BabelWith.me team, "The launch was moved up to offer free multilanguage communication with those in Iran." Check out this chat set up specifically for discussion of the Iran election and aftermath.

BabelWith.me is a product of the non-profit organization LifeChurch.tv.

Yet as the long-anticipated Astra finally emerges, we have to wonder is it "too little, too late" for this company?

What's to Like in Astra

After years of development, you would expect to be blown away by Astra, wouldn't you? We might not go that far, but we can say that Astra is a solid multi-protocol IM client. It supports the usual IM networks (Yahoo, Google, ICQ, Windows Live, AOL, Jabber/XMPP) as well as other services like MySpace, Facebook, Skype, and Twitter. You can even use the program to keep tabs on your various email accounts, both web-based and POP3/IMAP.

New to the software are a couple of different reply options - a standard reply and a "quick reply." You can choose which one you want by clicking the corresponding button on the pop-up notification. A standard reply opens the main chat window while the quick reply opens a text field in the pop-up window where you can type out your message.

The Astra software is extensible, too, and comes pre-loaded with a Widget Gallery where you can pick and choose widgets to add to your contact list. Some of the widgets include a countdown timer, a weather widget, and a flickr widget.

What's Annoying

Despite having 40 themes to choose from, I just couldn't get comfortable with Astra's UI. Your experience may differ. The problem has to do with a lack of contrasting colors in the themes, leaving some text so light, it was nearly impossible to see. The default font size didn't help either. Other buttons like the dash (-) and the plus sign (+), to collapse or expand windows, were so small that they, too, became nearly invisible.

Another annoyance has to do with email notifications. If you click on the new email pop-ups to read your latest message, Astra opens your inbox in a new browser window...with every pop-up you click, that is. After checking your email a handful of times, you're left with a crowded web browser filled with inbox tab after inbox tab.

After Three Years, This is All We Get?

The main problem with Astra is not that it's a bad IM client. It's solid, it does a good job, and it even has some nifty features to boot like the widgets or the "meta-contact" feature which lets you merge multiple contacts into one for friends that have identities on numerous networks.

The problem with Astra is that after being in development for this long, we expected something downright revolutionary. Something divine. What we got instead was a rather ordinary piece of software that can't even come close to capturing the excitement we once had as we anxiously awaited its release years ago.

Maybe we've outgrown the need for multi-client programs anyway. Really, most of our friends are on Google Chat or Skype these days and those that aren't are on Twitter and Facebook. It's not really that much of a hassle to open the appropriate program, or send a tweet when we can't IM, or even just write on their wall.

In fact, while we waited for Astra, we watched Twitter grow from tiny startup to international sensation. At this point, we'd rather tweet than IM in many cases, and while, yes, we can do that from Trillian, we can do it from a number of other Twitter clients, too. Today, it's almost like Trillian doesn't just compete with Digsby and Meebo, but it also has to fight the TweetDecks and Mixeros of the world, too.

In the end, there isn't anything particularly bad about Astra, there just isn't anything truly amazing either. We doubt its release will change our current habits, but that's just us. If you think you'll use Astra, tell us why in the comments. Or if you feel the same as we do, let us know that as well.

"SEO has been a great way for web sites to acquire new users, and will continue to be," said CEO Seth Sternberg in am email last night. "At the same time, site owners are looking for the next great way to attract additional users. i think that 'social graph optimization' can be the next SEO - making it really easy for your users to share content from your site to their friends, be they on social networks, IM networks, in email, etc."

Even cooler is the sharing option in the Meebo bar across the lower part of the screen. This feature enables users to share links via any IM service connected to their Meebo account as well as via Twitter, Facebook, and email. The feature reminds us a lot of Gmail Labs' addition of Google Search to email and chat.

This is what happens when the "Share" button in the Meebo bar is clicked:

Interested parties can get a closer look at features and functionality in this demo video:

Sites adopting the new tech from Meebo are expected to see significant spikes in user engagement. Partner sites announced today include Aeria Games, BakeSpace, Chictini, Fragegg, GamerNook, JamLegend, PlayedOnline, and SparkPeople.

The new Zoho Chat 2.0 is no dumbed-down client. It offers most of the features that you have come to expect from your IM desktop applications. You can send files, record your chat history, customize your theme, and more - just like regular IM apps allow. It does a few cool tricks, too. For example, you can type in a new event in the chat bar at the bottom of Zoho Calendar to create a new appointment on the fly. In Zoho Meeting, you can launch desktop sharing with others from within the IM application. (Windows only for now.)

The chat tool is also able to send you notifications from activities that take place within Zoho itself, including document sharing notifications, unread chat messages and more - definitely a handy feature. Future releases for chat include plans to introduce even more IM networks, most notably Skype.

This release represents a major upgrade of the chat application in Zoho. Current Zoho users can try Chat 2.0 here as of today: chat.zoho.com.

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.

Using Particls with Twitter:

For Twitter users, just follow @particls on Twitter. To track something, start your request with 'd particls.'

Example:

d particles follow "web 2.0"

will track all references to "web 2.0" on Twitter.

d particles follow "web 2.0", "web 3.0"

will track all references to "web 2.0" and "web 3.0"

Using Particls via IM:

If you would rather use your instant messaging program to be alerted about your tracked keywords, you can do so with any XMPP client, including Google Talk. To get started, just follow particls@particls.com. You can then use the following commands to begin tracking keywords:

follow "web 2.0"

will track all references to "web 2.0" on Twitter.

follow "web 2.0", "web 3.0"

will track all references to "web 2.0" and "web 3.0"

Will a Simplified Service Save Particls?

For whatever reason, the original RSS tracking and alerting service provided by Particls never quite caught on. Perhaps it was just a little ahead of its time. The service aimed to help us address our RSS/information overload issues before some of us even had any to address. But the concept behind the service was solid: a desktop ticker, instant prioritized alerts, easy sharing of RSS items, simple feed subscriptions, and so on. In fact, that version of Particls sounds a lot like one of our favorite desktop apps today, Snackr, which does many of the same things but launched nearly a year later.

We thought Particls 1.0 was a good first attempt at managing those sorts of issues, but it was not without its problems. The program was a Windows-only client, had some UI challenges, and, from personal experience, hit an older laptop's CPU just a bit too much.

Later, the company split the Particls solution into half, with one half becoming Engagd, an attention management engine, and the other half becoming Particls 2.0, the visualization and alerting engine. From the sound of it, those two projects have now been abandoned - the company notes that all resources have been diverted to the new project, Fountain.

Oops, a DM Limit

Unfortunately, there is one major concern regarding the new service, and it's not really Particls' fault. Currently, Twitter API limits direct messages to 5000 per day for whitelisted accounts. That will severely impact what the service can do using DMs.

Here's a video of Chris pondering this issue:

This API limit is a clear example of the sort of thing a company would gladly pay Twitter for access to, if only there was the option. It's unfortunate that Twitter's hard-set limits are actually affecting the abilities of other companies to innovate around the core product.

Yet that won't stop them from trying. For the record, Particls is not the first service to attempt to implement the missing Twitter Track feature. For example, the Twitter toolkit from TweetLater also provides this functionality. However, the difference between the two services is that TweetLater provides tracking via an emailed digest - not real-time alerts as Particls does.

Will Fountain be a Success?

Whether Particls Fountain will succeed where previous incarnations did not is something that's yet to be seen. However, the company is now actively working with the community and letting them drive the development. This critical step is vital to making a successful product, so it's encouraging to see the interaction.

Through the UserVoice site, 100 or so testers have already begun providing feedback about Fountain. They - and you - will be the people voting on the next step for the service, whether that's tracking your alerts history on the web, receiving an email digest, adjusting alerts through a web-based dashboard, or something else entirely.

If you want to give the service a try, you can do so today; just follow the instructions above. Besides UserVoice, you can also give feedback directly to the creators of Particls on Twitter: just follow @ashleyangell, @stephenkelly, and @chrissaad.

What's even better is that you can click on the notification in the Activity Stream to see all the relevant details. If the item was an image, for example, you can preview it or download the original. For blog posts and wiki pages, you can click to read the item that was updated. Plus, you can download any files that have been added straight from the Activity Stream to your desktop.

However, the cyn.in desktop client isn't just about automated notifications - it allows for those personal updates, too. But this is the enterprise, mind you, so we're not calling them "tweets" here - they are "status updates" instead. Guided by the prompt "What are you doing?" anyone can quickly set their status update which is then sent into the Activity Stream to update everyone else.

Taking a page from Jaiku's book, the client also includes a threaded discussions feature. Any item in the stream can be commented on whether it's an automated update or a personal status update. The replies can be viewed in a pop-up sidebar to the right of the original Activity Stream, just as with photos, wikis, and blog updates. Like FriendFeed, when someone comments on an item, that item bubbles up to the top so everyone is immediately alerted.

As any Twitter user could tell you, no microblogging product would be complete without search, and cyn.in is no exception. When you need to find something that had been posted before and has since fallen off the page, you can enter in a query straight into the desktop client itself. The results returned are ranked for you according to the percentage match and you can scroll through them just as you can with the Activity Stream.

The cyn.in client is beautiful implementation of how microblogging could (and perhaps should) work for businesses, but it's the client's integration with the cyn.in team collaboration suite that makes it so worthwhile. Of course, the decision to move away from your company's current collaboration suite is not one to be made lightly, so you should review the suite's features before deciding if it's right for you.

Other enterprise microblogging clients include Yammer, Present.ly, and Status, but none offer an integrated collaboration suite, too. Cyn.in is open source, but it can also be purchased as a hosted service or as an enterprise appliance.

Powered by fast-growing web IM platform Meebo, these new chat widgets can be accompanied by multimedia that chat users can view together. In a world where the magazine industry has to be feeling some pain from sites like MySpace and Facebook, maybe magazines have to put a little MySpace on their own websites.

We're very bullish on Meebo in general but this campaign, the Seventeen Magazine implementation in particular, is pretty uninspiring. We hope that when Meebo makes an appearance on PopularMechanics.com it will be a little more interesting. That wouldn't be hard.

Meebo tells a good story about huge increases in time on site for publishers that install their chat widgets, and that makes sense. Chat gives people a reason to stay on one page, if it's done well and there are a good number of people chatting then it's genuinely more interactive than anything a publisher can offer by themselves.

Meebo has a history of offering an interesting mix of aiming at the mainstream while still innovating in ways that are thought provoking for early adopters.

Bringing web IM to big mainstream websites is an interesting step in the evolution of publishing. We think it makes sense. We hope the big publishers can figure out what to do with it.

If you've never used FriendFeed before, it's a must-see application for sharing and discussing cool stuff on the web. This new feature addition is going to make it even better.

These simple, smart settings offer a whole lot of powerful possibilities. I've never set up particular bundles of friends on FriendFeed, but now that I could get just items from them on IM, I probably will for co-workers, trailblazers, etc.

The way that the company handled commenting on multiple items, by assigning a number to each and requiring an @# reply, is really smart.

Making it this friction-free to monitor and contribute to conversations has the potential to increase participation in FriendFeed by orders of magnitude.

The Down Sides

There's no way to get an IM when someone "likes" an item, which would be a nice option to have.

Unfortunately, there's still no ability to subscribe to searches inside FriendFeed. We would really like to get IMs from FriendFeed when anyone on the service mentions our new site Jobwire, and we'd like to be able to post a reply to them from inside IM as well. Not yet, though!

So come join us on FriendFeed and we can discuss the awesome things we find online - instantly!

Google Talk is probably one of the few messaging clients that doesn't have a way for you to interact with other Google Talk users unless you know their email address. GTalk Profile provides the perfect solution to this problem. Using Google Maps, GTalk Profile allows users to plot where they are on a map and also find other users around the world. Simply type your city and state into the search box and GTalk Profile will provide you with a list of users near you along with a description of each user. Clicking on a name takes you to a profile page where you'll find a longer description, photos, interests, location, and the option to request a user's Google Talk information.

Sign Up for GTalk Profile

Currently the most active countries seem to be Europe, Africa and South America. The United States is the least active country on GTalk Profile. Hopefully that will change soon. GTalk Profile is a great way to expand your Google contacts, though we'd be careful about accepting any and every request on this service.

The future of IM functionality on Twitter is blurry at best. What is clear is that this feature has been put on hold indefinitely. The company feels that this feature will be much better to manage and provide better stability to users if it were built from the ground up. However:

"Based on our analysis, the cost-to-benefit for IM for the most users is not as high as some other things--so it will be a while before we tackle it. Like any budget (in this case, the budget of our limited engineering time), tough calls need to be made--especially in these times. And while we don't expect everyone to agree with this decision, we at least want to be straightforward with you."

We Doubt It

We appreciate Twitter being straightforward about the feature. While we're a little disappointed to see that it won't be officially from Twitter, the functionality is still capable of being implemented by third party developers. Twitter recommends checking out Excla.im, a jabber bot IM service that allows you to update your Twitter status. However, Excla.im does not allow you to see your friends updates (yet). Just don't expect to see IM functionality back before the end of the year, or maybe even next spring.

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.

It's standards based, it will bring real-time "presence" to social networks unable to invest the resources to build out the feature for themselves and it sounds like a very good idea. None the less, we do have some concerns about how much social graph, user activity and advertising data Meebo is about to get its hands on.

Prelaunch partners in the initiative to date include PopSugar, Tagged, Pixo, Addicting Games, The Insider (CBS), DanceJam, Flixter, MyYearbook and SparkArt. Readers may not have heard of many of these services (unless you've been spammed by Tagged) but several of the sites do have significant user numbers.

Meebo hopes that by announcing the service now they will amass more partners before launch in Fall. The company says that though social networks have an unusually high average "time on site" between 20 and 30 minutes - Meebo numbers are dramatically higher. Chat sessions tend to stay open for between 2 and 3 hours each, the company says. Meebo says its 1 year old "Rooms" feature, group chat sessions with media sharing and embeddable in HTML web pages, now see an aggregate 28 million unique users each month. That's an insanely high number that could grow substantially when 1 to 1 communication is rolled out across partner social networks.

Partner networks will be able to choose whether to allow their users to chat with contacts on other IM networks from inside their sites. In other words, you may be able to hang out at Flixter and talk movies with friends from your AIM contact list who aren't on the site at the moment. We hope that the networks will choose to enable this much open communication and Meebo says that at least a few have already said that they will.

Who's not in? The stuffed shirts at LinkedIn won't be able to ping eachother instantly with business questions, they aren't taking part in the campaign so far. Neither is Ning, home of enough niche social networks to choke an army of horses. We'd like to see Ning go Meebo, but they are one of the few Web 2.0 startups on the market that's raised more money than Meebo already. Ning has raised $60 million, Meebo $30 million plus (VentureBeat).

There's More Money on the Table

These partner networks will share in the revenue served up by Meebo inside the chat window.

Meebo had a "come to Jesus" moment in April when it made a new hire and announced that it would be moving towards offering uniquely useful, crowd-pleasing advertising. We don't know how sophisticated this new advertising is really proving to be, but we stand behind our statement in April that cynics questioning the company's gargantuan valuation of $200m+ are wrong. Meebo is rocking the market and this new campaign is only going to make that more true.

Show us an infrastructure play that's based on open standards (Jabber/XMPP in this case) and we'll show you an innovation that we're excited about. IM is truly one of the most engaging features of the web and we expect that the users of many niche social networks will be excited about this partnership campaign.

What About User Data?

The one question we have about this otherwise fantastic sounding idea is this: is Meebo going to get its hands on too much user data? By powering IM across a list of social networks and being the choice for chat on AIM, Yahoo Messenger, etc. for millions of people - Meebo is going to have a great picture of who is friends with whom and exactly where.

The company told us that the open standard XMPP/Jabber makes this less frightening than it might be, but we're not so sure. Meebo will likely have a great deal of knowledge about all our "social graphs" as well as the user and advertiser activity on all the sites it partners with. Will users rise up and demand data portability? Will second tier social nets guard their traffic and ad data? Don't bet on it. We hope that the developer community will at least call loudly for Meebo to open up user data to it, so that innovation can spring from the company's huge store of information.

In the mean time, here comes a really great chat experience in a whole lot of new places.

So, what, exactly is Genome, then? Well, it's not really just one thing - it's four:

1. Social Network: Genome a social network like any other. You'll have a user profile, friends, and tools that let you social with them in comfortable, natural ways.
2. Contact Manager: You'll be able to keep track of your contacts' information on Genome.
3. Instant Messenger: Genome will provide an open instant messenger that's integrated with your contacts.
4. Identity & Social Graph Provider: Genome will have an open identity policy so your Genome identity is easily sharable with other sites. That means that other sites and services can query Genome for some pieces of your personal information.

The Genome project has only been in development for three months and most of the details on how it operates, technically speaking, are being kept quiet. However, we got a look at some of their plans as well as some screenshots of the mobile app.

What Genome Is Not

Genome is not an aggregator spock.com profiles or FriendFeed. Genome can function as your central identity, not a collection of your identities out on the web nor a collection of your social web activities.

It's not a competitor to other data portability movements like Facebook Connect, MySpace's Data Availability, or Google Friend Connect. Instead, Genome will work cooperate with them to give users control over their own data. To do so, Genome will not use any closed, proprietary protocols - only open standards.

What Genome Will Let You Do

Because it will use open protocols, the goal is to let users carry their identites anywhere on the web. Updates made to those identities out on the web will make their way back to Genome instead of users having to return to Genome to edit their profiles.

You'll be able to access Genome's service from a web app, a desktop client (they have a Windows, Mac, and Linux client planned), and a mobile app. A Google Android client has already been built, too. In fact, Genome's creators are particularly focused on the mobile market and are working on real-time sync and location awareness in this area. Of course, developers will also be able to build their own web apps and clients thanks to Genome's open standards and API.

We got a sneak peek at the Android app, but be warned, the app is still very much in alpha and may change a lot prior to launch:

To deal with "noise" Genome is implementing something they're calling a "real-life relationships" model. In your real life, says co-founder Chernyshov, "you can control who knows what about you, and you can control what you know about them." Those granular relationships will be available on Genome, yet kept as simple as possible.

How You'll Use Genome (At First)

There aren't too many details on the specifics of how you will use Genome or the technical details as to how Genome operates, but we do that the first public release will only be the beginning of their effort to solve all the problems noted at the beginning of this post. The first iteration of Genome will be focused on the problem of identity management.

In the area of contact and identity management, the problems that Genome wants to solve specifically include the following: you can't import or export data on today's social networks, you can't control who sees what about you, you can't watch who knows what about you, and you can't ask a new web service to retrieve your name, email, contacts, etc. from a social network site. Well, as for that last issue, data portability is supposed to address this, but perhaps Genome's creators aren't interested in waiting for the major providers to make it work.

To start off, you'll be able to import your address book contacts and (possibly) import friends from various social networks. (They aren't sure if they will have that feature ready for the first public launch or not). However, they do plan on supporting Google Friend Connect and, further down the road, they will offer automatic contacts discovery.

Once you add a contact to Genome, it's yours - it's not locked in any way. Unlike a network like Facebook, for example, who locks in your contacts so you have to keep using their walled garden service, the data from Genome can be freely moved about the web. If you add someone to Genome then invite them to join the service, their profile will be automatically linked with the contact you've already created. The details don't need to be re-entered.

Other Issues Being Addressed

As the Genome project progresses, future versions of the service will focus more on privacy concerns, distractions, quality interactions, and advertisements. (More details can be found on this post about Genome.) How these issues will be dealt with is currently under wraps.

Privacy: Privacy levels will be set up to mirror real-life relationships: spouse or significant other, family, best friend, friend, buddy, colleague, business partner, high school acquaintance, contact, etc. Human relationships have detailed nuances - social networks should, too.

Distractions: Social networks today are bogging us down with messages, invitations, pokes, and friend requests. Some of these matter, some of these waste our time, but how can we pay attention to only the really important things? Genome plans to address this.

Quality Issues: The more "friends" you have, the less rich the interactions and the relationships you maintain with your friends on your social networks. Interactions become one-way, more similar to RSS than to real relationships.

Ads: Today's ads are often irrelevant, usually unwanted, and sometimes even inappropriate. Even targeted ads seem to miss the mark. If Genome truly has a solution for this problem, that will be extremely impressive.

Conclusion

At the moment, Genome sounds almost too good to be true - a social networking service that solves all our problems? Nevertheless, it's certainly intriguing. If it can really do what it proposes to do, then it's worth signing up for (sign-up is here).

Facebook Requests: Dan Zen