Digsby will change the way you communicate online

----- Begin NetScrap(TM) -----

Digsby will change the way you communicate online


Really. It will. 


Digsby is a multi-im client along the lines of Trillian, Pidgin, and the Meebo. Use Digsby to organize your IM chatter. Through a single application/interface, you can ping 
all your friends on the big IM services (AIM, YIM, MSN, GTalk, ICQ, Jabber). They kick it up a few notches by supporting Twitter, 
Facebook, and MySpace social services. They kick it up another notch by supporting email as well: gmail, ymail, msnmail, pop, imap 
accounts. 

Updates and notifications from all these services arrive on the desktop in bubbly status messages that appear even if Digsby is 
minimized. You can even reply to a message by typing in the status bubble. 



I love the way this blurs the boundaries between all these communication channels. A message could arrive from a person (who cares how 
it got here), my reply bounces back through the same channel. 

Here's another way Digsby is pushing envelopes with their service. A few clicks will let you set up a widget that you can embed in your various web-hangouts, blogs, facebook account, etc. 

Digsby does a stellar job of running their project with transparency and input from their users. They've managed to build a close 
relationship with an active user community by using all the social resources available. They go far beyond the requisite blog (even if they brag about the strange bugs that 
turn up in their public testing cycles). Users have a channel to reach Digsby via twitter, to 
get involved with an active developer community (also on 
twitter incidentally). The steady drumbeat of prioritization from regular public 
roadmap polls has kept Digsby on track to satisfy users. On top of all this, they've built in a great alert/warning system that 
lets folks at digsbyhq push status message out to all users ('twitter is having trouble today'). 

Kudos to their team involved with support and outreach. If I were running a customer-facing service, I'd likely use Digsby to manage 
the customer contacts. I wonder if they're eating their own dogfood 
over there at digsbyhq? 

There are a few caveats of course. Because what software is perfect? Digsby does not yet support IRC or Skype chats. As far as I can 
see, the multi or 'room' chat features aren't supported on any of the IM services. All of these features are on their roadmap. 

Digsby is ready for primetime and worth a try.


----- End NetScrap(TM) -----