Tell Me About Digsby
You’re on AIM, MSN and Yahoo! Messenger. You have Google Talk through Gmail and you still have that old ICQ account lying around.
You think you have it covered with Trillian or Pidgin.
Perhaps you think you are a step ahead of your coworkers because you are using Meebo.
Think again.
There’s a new player in town, and its name is Digsby. I’m not sure what the logo represents (A rock? A blob?), but it wears a baseball cap and it knows how to talk in all dialects of IM. And that’s just the beginning. Add social networks like Facebook, Myspace and yes, even Twitter. Email checking for Yahoo, Gmail and more. Themes. Configuration sync. Contact merge. Facebook and embed-able flash site widgets for chatting. Cross-platform support. And more.
Let’s start from the top and work our way into the details.
Overview
When you first sign up for Digsby and get the client installed and running, it looks a lot like Trillian, or any other multi-IM client out there. Dock-able contact list, theme support, grouping of contacts, the works. You might notice (in Windows at least) that it puts itself in your icon tray. From there you can conveniently change your global status or get to the preferences pane. The real magic happens when you start adding other services.
Go ahead. Throw in your Twitter, your Gmail, your Facebook. New icons will pop up, indicating new activity on those services. Click on the icons and you can get details, click a link to open that site in a browser window. The Twitter icon opens a window that allows you to reply to a tweet, look at your replies, directs or favorites.
Ok, now we are getting somewhere.. we have our email and social media notification, along with a nice IM client.. but haven’t we seen this somewhere? Yes, it is reminiscent of Flock in some ways, except for IM of course. And no browser. You know what I mean. It’s like taking the social media sidebar out of flock and dropping it into a nice IM client.
Speaking of IM, let’s start with that.
Instant Messaging Support / Customization
IM is core to Digsby. Here’s a feature run-down, in no particular order:
It supports all the major IM protocols: AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber. Notably, there isn’t any support for IRC (yet).- You can set universal away and available status messages, from the contact window a la Google Talk.
- It supports invisible mode.
- It can detect what music you are listening to.
- Hovering over a contact gives you more information about them, and gives you access to the user-specific menu.
- Separate theme and conversation window style support.
- Tabbed IM window, with support for dragging tabs out, or in to other IM windows.
- Fully-developed conversation log viewer, lets you choose by buddy and date (very nice!)
- The user-specific menu allows you to get info, send/receive IMs, transfer files (or check what files have been transferred), send a quick email to the contact via a pre-configured email account, send a text message (to any number), start an audio/video chat using a 3rd party flash app, look up past chats, block/add user and a quick link to the alert menu.
- Minimize IM windows and get a new IM popup. Reply from within the popup!
- Merge contacts. This is a great feature — you can combine multiple IM client contacts (say you friend’s AIM and Yahoo!) into one contact in the buddy list. Awesome.
- Sort your buddy list any way you want.
There are some novel concepts here, even in the jaded field of IM clients. I totally saved the best for last on that list. Being able to shoot off a quick reply in an IM popup window is sweet. Doesn’t take you out of context, great for snap replies. Also, the ability to merge your buddies’ separate contacts is super-handy. I have some friends who (like me) have a login to 5 different IM services, and then use a multi-client. So they all log in at the same time, and take up 5 lines of precious buddy list real estate. This fixes that issue.
The ability to sort the buddy list by group, status, service, service then status, etc. is fantastic. I found ways of viewing my buddy list I never even considered with other IM clients.
The buddy list skin and conversation theme support is nice, but isn’t quite there in terms of adding new skins and themes. It really should have its own theme handler like Winamp, but for now you have to unzip the skin/theme and copy the files to the correct sub-directory.
Digsby is notably lacking IRC support, which for really old-skool folks is a must. I always thought IRC was a bit heavy for most IM clients, and adding it to Digsby by itself would be a mistake, because Digsby also doesn’t support chat rooms. On the surface these don’t have much to do with each other — but think about it. If Digsby allowed people to make a spontaneous chat room for all their friends (like Meebo and Trillian do), they could re-use that ‘chat room’ implementation for IRC. So I’d like to see both make an appearance.
Also, I am personally disappointed that the IM chat window does not have a handy URL embed link that most clients offer. I use IM mostly to send links to my friends, and sometimes those links are HUGE. It would be much nicer if I could embed the URL in an anchor tag and spare my buddies the multi-line URL text, even if it is click-able.
Email and Social Networks
Digsby rolls robust support for multiple web-based and traditional email services into its application. You get Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, POP, IMAP, and AIM mail support. Digsby handles its email accounts a little differently than Trillian, though, allowing you to specify as many accounts to check as you like. That’s a definite plus.
You can mark a message read or as spam from within the notification popup window. It’s little touches like this that make you wonder why more mail monitoring clients didn’t do it first.
You can compose a new email from the IM conversation window, as stated above. Handy.
On the social networking side, you’ve got Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. That may seem like a fairly short list until you realize that each of these integrations is fairly fully featured.
Facebook gives you your river of news as well as your last status update. You can change your status from a link in the window. Also, it does a good job of making a link out of pretty much any Facebook page you could go to within the context.
Myspace is very similar to Facebook. To be honest, I don’t use Myspace so I can’t tell you if it does anything really cool/special. Let me know if you find anything!
Saving the best for last again, the Twitter notification window has a nice river of tweets view with shortcut icons to reply, fave or direct message on every tweet. You can also post a new tweet, of course. The posting window keeps track of your remaining characters and sets a hard-stop when you hit zero. There is also a URL shortening link that uses snipr without leaving the interface.
Personally, I still like Twhirl a bit more for its ability to stack individual tweet notifications as they come in. Digsby gives you a popup with a x/x in the corner. As long as your mouse is hovering over the popup, it won’t fade away. Great unless you get a new 1 of 5 twitter pop, and a separate 1 of 3 email pop simultaneously.. and one of them fades out before you can attend to it. Not a severe issue but still, annoying.
Unique Features
Digsby has a couple more tricks up its sleeve. The first, big one is synchronization. Yes, that does mean what you are guessing — everything you configure in Digsby, from the theme, buddy list sorting, window position, and preferences… are synced to the Digsby server. It uses a secure 128-bit blowfish (think SSH style) connection and means you can install Digsby on any system, on any platform (in theory), and be up and running quickly with only one login name and password. Meebo may gotten there first, but Digsby definitely takes it to a new level.
Speaking of any platform, Digsby’s beta platform is Windows, but they are promising builds on Mac OS X and Linux as well! If they get everything to work the same across all these operating systems, that will be a killer feature.
Another feature that Digsby supports thanks to its ASP-style implementation is a Digsby chat widget. Similar (again) to Meebo, this gives you a customizable embeddable flash widget that connects directly to your Digsby login. Put it on your web site, instant chat availability for your visitors. Use their Facebook widget and your friends can say ‘hi’ without having to leave the page.
Summary
I’ve been using Digsby for almost two months now, which in Digsby development time, makes me an early adopter. Overall, I find it very easy to use, especially configured where the buddy list is docked to a side and slides out of view, and I get my social network buttons in the tray. Perfect.
Digsby has a huge wish list on their community/theme site. For example, wishes for future support of FriendFeed, IRC, Pownce, etc. My wish for a URL embed is on there too, but near the bottom (they do say they are working on it.)
Bottom line — if you use IM, email and social networks in Windows, and don’t like that stuff residing in your browser, check out Digsby.
Credit
I blatantly stole not only the Digsby icon (from their press page, so that should be fine) but a bunch of their screenshots. You can find all the screenshots here.