Digsby, the new IM cloud.

People might have heard about twitter, it is a place where people can maintain an online, public diary. People could write whatever they want directly from the twitter portal or even through various IMs by adding twitter ID as buddy and sending them IMs. The service is really unique (and wierd, some may think), but nevertheless very popular. It even won the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi)( aka "spring break for geeks.") awards. Twittering is also referred to as micro-blogging.
Now, after creating a new realm in the web, they are with their new product, Digsby ( I could not get a meaning for this word, though). Digsby is an integrated IM client which can handle multiple protocols like Yahoo!, MSN, Gmail, AOL etc. But, that doesnt end there, it can handle e-mails and more amazingly the social networking accounts like MySpace, Facebook too. That might give it an edge over the existing Trillian, Miranda etc. And the interface too looks better.
At first, even I thought Digsby is just another Trillian. But, it didn’t take me much to realize I am wrong. The installation was a breeze( you have binaries for Windows, Linux and Mac, I tried Windows). Then the configuration, you can add your accounts to it, IM accounts, e-mail accounts, and Social Networking accounts( only MySpace and Facebook for now, but they promise for more in future). Once this is done, the main window is divided into panes to show your chat buddies, mails and social links. You can even configure their placement. It looks really organized. Another feature is you can group your buddies, that is, if you have a same buddy in MSN, Gtalk and Yahoo!, you can create a single nickname for that and it would be compact. Whenever you run your mouse over a buddy name in the list, it will automatically show his profile details, fetched from the internet. Another good thing about Digsby is that it has dozens of nice and appealing themes for every taste. I spent over a night choosing my style. The information and alerts come up as nice little pop-ups on desktop. Digsby also lets you create your own widgets.
In the downside, there is not support for Orkut and other social networking accounts. And in the IM side, the buddy images does not come up correctly, even if they have an avatar of icon, set, Digsby tends to ignore it and show the default icon. But things will change in the near future. Atleast, the beta tag is still hanging around Digsby’s neck. So, hope you enjoy the experience with purple colored, egg shapped, capped buddy.
Digsby Home.
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