Digsby

It has come to my attention that not a whole bunch of people know too much about Digsby or use it. I’m a big fan, os I thought I’d take a moment to post about it. It’s a great tool for communication with friends, colleagues, business partners, and even family. What sets Digsby apart from all the other chat clients out there? There are so many chat clients it isn’t even funny anymore. Most of them are now attempting to cram every service out there into one and none does better than Digsby. I’ve been using Digsby for quite some time now and it’s served me pretty well. Let’s do a little in depth review, shall we?

The motto on the title of the Digsby web page is as follows: Digsby = IM + Email + Social Networks. That’s pretty much as great summation of what Digsby is and what it does. Like most of the other chat clients that try to consolidate, Digsby gathers all of your buddies from AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber. It’s easy to use because it adds all those buddies of yours and places them onto the same buddy list. You can reorganize your buddies so you can see them by service. Its very much like Trillian in a sense since it consolidates your buddies and shows a different icon next to your buddy’s icons to indicate the service. Pretty neat huh?

One feature that Trillian lacks, but Digsby has is the ability to connect to most e-mails and most of the popular social networks. It’s an excellent way to contact everyone you know. Yea, sure some people say it is very stalker-like, but in this day and age of technology, if it isn’t real-time and stalker-like, then it isn’t good anymore and is outdate. Think about, what about Nextbus.com, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and all that you can do with smartphones. Anyway, Digsby can connect with Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! mail, AOL mail, any imap email address, as well as any pop email address. When it comes to social networks, it can now connect to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and LinkedIN. So what does it even mean when it says that you can connect to e-mail and social networks? For e-mail, you’ll get notifications whenever you recieve new mail. When you connect to social networks, you’ll get status update alerts for your friends, be able to update your own status, view your friend’s newsfeeds, and even chat with your buddies. For example your Facebook friends and Myspace friends will be added to the buddy list when they are online, meaning you can chat with them without having to log on through a browser. However, don’t be surprised when more networks are addded. So far, Digsby does not dissapoint.

Let’s talk features. Besides the obvious, as in it connects to so many services, it also can manage several chat tabs in just one window. No matter what service, you can still have all your conversations in one central place. Like AIM, you can rename your contacts with aliases, send SMS messages from your desktop, change your status, multi-task, and view log histories. One cool feature that I find really useful is that there is a mini-message that appears with alerts and IM conversations. Of course you could hide them, but they’re really spectacular. Even if you have a window maximized, the mini-message will appear and you can get alerts and chat with your contacts without even having to switch to the chat window. Enjoy the screenshots and definitely try Digsby out!