Digsby

If you’re a social maven with multiple email accounts, social media sites and IM accounts, give Digsby a try. If you use more than one computer, get a Digsby account and then you’ll never be parted from all your networking sites. Just sign into your Digsby account (requires a software install), and find out what’s happening across all your social networks.

Digsby rolled out a huge update in June, 2009. They promise they are lighter weight (consume about 50% less resources), and they’ve fixed many bugs.

I’ve had it on my work laptop for many months and just decided to install it on the family computer with the Windows 7 RC. It seems to be really snappy with Windows 7 on  my older Dell.

Digsby seems to be covering all their bases with the social networks, email & IM. Here’s a list of what can be aggregated for you:

Social Networking

Facebook         MySpace        Twitter        LinkedIn

Email

Gmail         Yahoo Mail        Live/Hotmail      AOL Mail     IMAP   POP

IM

Yahoo      MSN         Google Talk       AIM         ICQ         Jabber

What’s To Like

• As long as I have Digsby installed, I can simply sign in once and have instant access to all my social media accounts
• With the addition of LinkedIn, Twitter, POP & IMAP mail, I can truly have everything aggregated in one desktop sidebar.
• I like the ability to turn on and off notifications – I usually leave them off as it’s too distracting to see so many pop-ups.  But if you’re waiting for a particular message, it would be helpful.
• It is more lightweight on my systems – good news since I’ve got multiple things running at all times.
• Ability to post updates right from Digsby. I save some screen real estate and resources because I don’t have to log into LinkedIn or Twitter to see what’s happening or to post an update. This is a big plus.

Not To Like

I didn’t care for all the add-ons being pushed on me during the install. The Freeze search, the video player and maybe something else. For the unsuspecting person, I’m sure they just hit accept for all these things and then wonder where it came from. I wish this could be eliminated – but perhaps this is how they keep it free.

Still Figuring Out

POP Mail. Specifically I’m looking at getting an Outlook mail account from one computer to work on a different computer. I understand that if I have Outlook installed on both computers, but with different email accountson each computer, I can’t pull up an email. However, I can view a list of emails currently on that computer with a short preview.

Reading the Digsby forums, people were asking for Digsby to support accessing their webmail instead of a desktop client (like Outlook). They said that they had added this feature, so I looked in the advanced settings and saw that there is a place to cut and paste your webmail URLs (one for in-box and one for the compose box). I tried this, however, it crashed my Firefox browser!  I got a Java applet error.

I will try it again and try it with IE to see if I get a different result. If any Digsby users out there are reading this – would like to get your experiences. I’ll post an update next week after I work on it more.

I blogged a couple of weeks ago on how Facebook added a chat feature where you can see how many of your friends are on-line from within Facebook and initiate a chat with them.

Just recently, I saw that Digsby (a chat aggregator, along the lines of Meebo), has a feature where you can chat with your Facebook friends without being logged into Facebook! Check out the screenshot below. Not only can you use Digsby as a chat aggregator, you can also add Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to Digsby to consolidate and manage most of your social networking sites in one place! They say other social networking sites are coming soon.

Here are the social networking features Digsby offers:

• Stay up to date with everything happening on your Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace account (other network support coming soon).
• Receive alerts of events such as new friend requests, messages, group invites, etc.
• The social network InfoBox gives you a real time NewsFeed of what your friends are up to. Everything from new photos, to status updates, to upcoming birthdays is just a click away.
• Set your Facebook and Twitter status right from Digsby.

Go to the web site and and download to your desktop. Digsby also has some other cool features that we will explore at a later time. Enjoy!