Digsby Review

For those that aren't aware of Digsby, it's a multi-protocol IM client with a few added features. Digsby is currently in private beta. I've had the opportunity to use Digsby for several weeks now, and I have to say up front, I love this app. (Please note that the screenshots here have any identifying information removed, except for those things from public streams like Twitter.)



The added features I'm talking about are webmail, Facebook and Myspace integration. Integrated email isn't new to the IM world, but the Social Network integration certainly is and it's very handy.

Digsby supports a nice subset of IM Protocols. At this point they support AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Jabber, MSN, and ICQ, which just about covers everybody. For email support, they cover Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Gmail, AOL/AIM mail, Pop 3 and IMAP.





The pleasant surprise for me was that my Google hosted domain mail worked just fine as a Gmail account (rather than setting it up as IMAP). Very easy to set up and use. Basically, you get several notifications of new mail. It shows up as a window on the left hand side of the screen, and I also check the number of messages in my email box at any time by looking at either the buddy list window or the tray icon.

Both mail messages and new IM messages pop up on the left, and if you see a new IM message, rather that switching to the chat window, you can simply click the text input box underneath the message in the notifier, and type your response right there. That's a very cool feature, and lets me to continue to work on whatever I want and chat at the same time, even with multiple people.




As far as social networking integration goes, I don't have a myspace account, so I can't speak for that, but the Facebook integration is wonderful. It notifies you immediately whenever something happens with one of your friends pages (like, they change status, get a wall post, etc) or when you have new mail.

There are of course some negatives to multiprotocol IM clients. Like most of them, Digsby doesn't support cams or voice chat. Since I use neither, that's not an issue for me, but if you're big on either, this isn't the client for you. Also, as it is Beta software, Digsby is a tad buggy, but that's to be expected, and the development team rapidly responds to Bug Reports. Digsby pushes out new builds often. The Digsby blog clearly spells out what changes are made to the software, so you can always check to see what's happening.

One really neat feature I like about Digsby is that all of your account information is kept on their servers, and I thought I'd mention it because that might be a privacy issue for some people. For me, it's just darn convenient. I installed Digsby on another machine and just typed in my Digsby username and password, and I was automatically logged into everything. Very nice.

Of course, now that I'm moving over to Mac, I'll have to run Digsby in virtualization if I want to use it, since it's Windows only for now. They are promising both Mac OS X versions and Linux versions, and I suspect it's only a matter of a few months before we see one or both.

Now if they would only add Twitter, Pownce and LinkedIn support....Oh, and python scripting support would be nice.