Version 2.30 of the GNOME IM client Empathy has been released today. Love it or hate it (and I certainly had my moments when it first replaced Pidgin as the default Ubuntu IM client), Empathy has come a long way and is constantly improving. How these latest changes stack up we’ll see but here’s a summary of the new features:

• Improved accounts dialogue, including a new Facebook account widget and first-run wizards
• Better chatroom support
• Better error reporting
• Drag and drop file sharing

There are naturally a number of other things I’d like to see in Empathy but any improvements are good and the above definitely helps with overall usability and easy of use and considering that Empathy is the main IM client of Ubuntu, that’s pretty important.

For the full release info, check out the following page.