I’m Digging Digsby

Posted on June 5, 2008 2 Comments

A couple days ago I asked (via twitter) for advice on a simple IM client that would help me with my multiple Google Talk IDs. I mean, I know meebo would work but was hoping for something that doesn’t need as much screen space.

[Which reminds me: I wonder if the meebo Firefox sidebar add-on ever truly became capable of sidebar only? I recall that when I last checked you had to have meebo open in a tab]

Why multiple Google Talk IDs? I have one for work associated with my hosted Google Apps account. I also have a personal one that I run from time to time. Thus I run the GTalk stand-alone app for one and the web based one for the other. Gets a bit silly, you know?

Mortisult sent me a note suggesting I check out Digsby. I’d heard of it but had yet to try it so… off I went to download it.

Similar to Pidgin, Miranda and Trillian, Digsby can handle many different IM protocols – including multiples. So taking care of my two google talk accounts isn’t an issue.

But there are some great bonuses too. It also has some awesome email integration, including “native” clients for all the popular services along with POP3 and IMAP. From the notifiers you can actually manage the mail.

For example, here’s a Gmail notice that popped up while writing this piece:

disby-gmail

(first comment that I had to manually spam today. New antispam plugin working great! More on that later…)

The “inbox” and “compose” links are always there. By hovering over the individual email, the other links all show up at the bottom. Pretty cool, incredibly useful and very handy. As you can see from the tray, I’m monitoring 3 different Gmail accounts.

Also, as you can see from the tray, Digsby has Twitter integration too. Truly useful integration to boot. It doesn’t get in the way, it can be unobtrusive and it offers all the features you’d expect to see.

I guess I should mention it also supports Facebook and MySpace, but I haven’t tried that aspect yet. I barely use facebook and I’ve never used MySpace…

Regarding the tray icons: They’re optional. They don’t have to be there. Don’t panic. I just happen to like ‘em.

Hmm, what else? Logging. Skins. Tons of options. Synchronization so that all your Digsby installs can have the same settings. There’s even a chat widget to plop onto your sites.

Memory usage is a bit steep, but not the end of the world. For instance, I’ve been running this all day and it’s sitting at about 47MB. On a 2GB machine, that’s just a blip, but it’s worth considering.

To summarize: after just 2 days of use I’m hooked and impressed. If nothing else, just for all the capabilities in one small package it is worth a shot.

Tags: Digsby, email, gmail, google-talk, im, meebo, Pidgin, trillian, twitter