A touted feature is the ability to monitor multiple email accounts right from Digsby. This could be helpful if I have responsibility for monitoring email for my clients. However, it could be a big distraction as well. I’m working along for one client when I see an email for another and then I get off task. What do you all think? Here are the features from the web site:

• Manage your Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM Mail, IMAP, and POP accounts right from Digsby.
• Get popup notifications when new email arrives. Clicking a popup takes you right to the message with auto-login into webmail accounts.
• The email InfoBox gives you a snapshot of your unread messages with just one click
• Perform actions such as “Mark as Read” or “Report Spam” right from the email InfoBox.
• Send emails to your friends right from the IM window. The email is sent directly from any account digsby is tracking for you.

How do some of you use IM with your businesses? What does it do to your productivity? If you use it for business, then Digsby seems like a great aggregator. If you have friends/clients with multiple IM accounts, it will combine them into one identity to reduce clutter. You can send SMS messages from Digsby (but you can from Yahoo as well). You can rename your contacts to their actual names so you don’t have to remember the cryptic names people sometime have. Scrolling your mouse down your list of buddies instantly shows everyone’s status. As mentioned in a previous post, you can also monitor your social networking sites and conduct chats from Digsby.

Your Digsby account follows you from computer to computer (although you’ll still have to download software to each computer). Just login and your previous customizations will be there for you. Speaking of customization, Digsby offers a huge assortment of skins, colors, etc. to make your ‘user experience’ rich. Take a look here at all the screen shots and customization options.

So if you are using IM/chat, I’d like to get your feedback of what you use and why. Is it helpful for multiple clients, or do you use it for personal use? Currently, I’m just using Yahoo Messenger and it works for me. There are quite a few features with Yahoo that Digsby doesn’t have…but that’s another blog topic!

In addition to the multitudes of things Facebook does, another one popped up this week that is really cool–a chat feature! I saw it the other day and did a little background reading about it. Seems that they were slated to launch this new app in March of 2008, but it just launched this week.

Using it is super easy. Log in to your Facebook account and then you’ll see the below. Mine is in the lower right hand portion of my screen. It also shows you who of your friends are currently on-line. As is common with other chat programs, you can make yourself unavailable if you’re feeling a bit unsociable, or you’re working. Happy Chatting everyone!

Welcome to Facebook Chat

Start instant conversations with all of your friends.

Check the Online Friends menu to see who is online now.

A green dot means your friend is available to chat.

Don’t want to chat? Make yourself unavailable.

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