Trumblog

After a seeing a couple of mentions yesterday on TechCrunch and Bub.blicio.us I downloaded the new IM client Digsby in order to give it a try over Trillian which I had been using. Digsby is nice upgrade.

Like Trillian, Digsby is a multi protocol IM client, which means that it gives you simultaneous access to several IM accounts and if you don’t have multiple IM accounts, that’s the reason why I do. Some folks have MSN, some AIM, some Google Talk and they don’t all play nice, so I have a few accounts which means I can chat with you no matter what account you signed up with. I’m nice like that.

Registration with DIgsby was easy and functionality is exactly what you expect for IM. TechCrunch and Bub.blicio.us posted about Digsby because it supports Facebook Chat as well as AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk, ICQ and Jabber. Having Facebook Chat is great and a good out of the starting gates feature that gives Digsby some buzz, but that alone won’t keep me with Digsby since I imagine that it’s just a matter of time till Trillian, and the other IM clients like it, do to.

But here’s where Digsby takes it up a notch. It also includes social network updates and email notification. Bam!. You can set up notifications from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace and also email notifications from any email address that you want; Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, AOL/ AIM Mail, and POP and IMAP accounts. Your Facebook status, alerts and news feed are available with a quick rollover that includes easy links to Facebook and updating of your status directly from Digsby. Your Tweetstream is available in the same easy way and you can update it from Digsby too.

I’ve only got Gmail running on Digsby so far and Digsby’s giving me popup alerts of email messages and rollover access to a list of emails in my Inbox with click through to read them on Gmail.com.

Pulling all of these notifications in one place is incredibly handy because I can rely on one program for all of this social and messaging data that I had been culling from and adding to using a variety of sources. It’s also nice for consistency’s sake to have similar notifications of tweets, emails and IMs. Downloading was fast, but installation was slow due to a few components that needed to be updated on my laptop, but once that was done I was up and running pretty quickly.

Digsby also doesn’t seem to be sitting on it’s laurels. They have a nice wish list going, seem to be looking to expand into notifications from additional social networks and are adding themes, skins and emoticons if you’ve got the time and need for that. I expect that there will be updates and expansions for Digsby on a regular basis that will give the Flock people sidebar that I’ve been enjoying lately a run for it’s money.

Looks like I’ve got a new IM client.