I have long been a fan of Digsby, a multiprotocol instant messaging application. Like Trillian and Pidgin, Digsby can connect to all the major instant messaging services like AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, ICQ, Google Talk and Jabber. Unlike the others, however, Digsby can also connect to social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn. It even has a built-in email checker, too.
Digsby has always been free. This presents a problem for the company that develops it: how can you make money when your product is free?
For the past couple of versions, they have used product tie-ins with the Digsby installer to install various toolbars and other applications. This isn’t unheard of in the software world (even Sun’s Java installer asks if you want to install the MSN toolbar… isn’t that ironic?). And even if Digsby had more toolbar offers than most, they were easy to click “No” to, and you only had to deal with it once, during the install (after that, all Digsby upgrades run automatically in the background).
But news leaked this week about something a bit more insidious: it seems that there is a clause in section 15 of the Digsby EULA which allows the company to install a grid computing module with the client, and run that during your computer’s idle time. What makes this so bad is that it’s buried in the EULA and not displayed at any time during the installation. There’s no way for the end user to opt-out of this, and after installation the only way to disable it was to click Help > Help Support Digsby and uncheck a box marked “Help Digsby conduct research”:
While Digsby published an article about this on their site last December, it was only this week that CNet stumbled across the issue and wrote a screed advising users to ditch the program. To their credit, Digsby’s developers released a new version of the program this week that moves the grid computing option to the “Preferences” section, has a box that pops-up during install allowing users to lean more about the grid computing module, and also wrote this post explaining what the grid module does.
I think that burying the grid module deep in the EULA was sneaky, and Digsby’s developers should take some heat for it. But, in a way, I can’t blame them. The company needs to make money some way or another. The company’s explanation and subsequent actions seem to indicate that they knew they messed up, and Digsby is so good that I won’t stop using it just because of this.
As mentioned, if you are a current Digsby user, go to Help > Help Promote Digsby to turn the grid module off; if you upgraded this week, open “Preferences” and look for the “Help Promote Digsby” options there. In either case, simply click tge “Help Digsby conduct research” button to disable the feature.
1) Trillian supports FB and Twitter, too (in the new Astra builds).
2) Trillian is free. Although you can buy a Pro membership.
3) Digsby always kills my machine’s performance. I would see folks like you praise how cool it was and then I would install it and it would destroy my machine’s response times. I would get fed up after a day and delete it from my machine. Something I have never had to do with Trillian in over 5 years of using it.
1) Trillian has the WORST interface of any program ever written. Well, maybe it comes in second behind some Japan-only Sony software I once tried, but for a mainstream Windows application, Trillian is… blech!
2) And Digsby is always free.
3) Sounds like PEBCAK (hehehehe). Seriously, older versions of Digsby used an unholy amount of RAM (but not CPU cycles). Newer versions are much better, although Digsby was never an issue on my old P4 machine (I used Digsby on it until this past Christmas, and the machine dated back to 2003).