Trillian – So many friends, so many instant messengers… Multi-messengers are more plentiful today than they were a couple of years ago. You know the kind I mean — one program that will let you chat with your buddies on AIM, your co-workers on MSN, your Ultima Online pals on ICQ and your boyfriend on Yahoo! instant messenger. As far back as I can remember, Trillian has been around to make chatting simpler. It’s the Yoda of cross-platform instant messengers.

Plus, for geeks like me who have a need to customize EVERYTHING, there are skins in abundance to change the look and feel of the application. The privacy settings are highly customizable as well so if you’re not speaking to your boyfriend today, it takes about two seconds to set yourself invisible to him and no one else. Trillian also has SMS and IRC support.

Firefox – Mozilla’s browser won my heart and screen real estate over two years ago on the idea of tabbed browsing alone. Little did I know I’d fall further in love with goodies in the form of extensions. The user-driven development community is as huge as the hate is for Microsoft these days. I could spend all day browsing through page after page of extensions for the browser ranging from development tools, to communication and blogging tools, to toys and games.

Reading that old post makes me laugh… part of me can’t believe it’s been two years since I wrote that and part of me can’t believe I ever browsed the web any other way. I want to mention two of my favorite extensions here as well. The View Formatted Source extension is displays formatted and color-coded source information for the page you’re viewing and, optionally, CSS info. It’s a must-have for tweaking site layout or editing a theme someone else has designed to suit your own needs. When I went to create custom design for my World of Warcraft guild’s website, I used this extension, ahem… extensively. Coupled with ColorZilla and able only to modify the header graphics and CSS due to the hosting service we use, I transformed the site from a standard out-of-the-box template that about 50 other guilds were using to a truly custom design complete with tabard-matching colors and artwork. Colorpicker creates an eyedropper tool you can use on any part of your screen to get the hexadecimal color code for that pixel. It’s a real time-saver for hacks like me.