If you’re like me, your friends and family use different Instant messaging (IM) networks. Most of my Atlanta friends, for example, use MSN Messenger, while most of my Charlotte friends use AIM. My best friend from high school uses Yahoo! Messenger, and I have a business need to use a Jabber client.
For years, “all-in-one” chat programs like Trillian and Pidgin have allowed you to use multiple IM networks at once. I have been (and still am) a huge fan of Pidgin, a lightweight app that lets me keep in touch with everyone and not have have to run six different chat programs simultaneously. But that loyalty is wavering in the face of a new client: Digsby.
Digsby allows you to connect to the AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and Jabber Networks. Nothing new there, really. But Digsby also allows you to receive notifications from social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. So when someone posts something on your Facebook wall or MySpace profile, a small pop-up will appear, telling you who did what. You can even hover your mouse over the social networking icon and get a summary of what’s going on, so there’s no need for you to launch a web browser just to see what’s going on with Facebook or MySpace. Digsby also supports email notifications from Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and AOL mail, as well as any POP or IMAP account, so it’s got you covered there, too.
Digsby has been around for almost a year now, so it’s not really “new”. What is new is that newer versions of the app are much better behaved than earlier ones, which tended to be resource hogs. After being scared off of it by reports that it used up to 200MB of RAM, I’ve finally given it a shot… and I like it! One thing I especially like about it over Pidgin: it keeps like log files in the “My Documents” folder instead of hidden away like Pidgin does; this makes for easy backups with Mozy.