Digsby Download & Social IM Client Review

A recent ad campaign for Digsby hit the NYC area pretty hard.  While walking through midtown I was bombarded with a bus stop reading “Digsby, ya dig!”, and decided to learn more about the product. I figured it might’ve been a new cartoon, or television show from the friendliness of the mascot they’re using to promote the new client.

Digsby is a IM client which features social media such as Facebook, twitter, Linkedin, Myspace as well as email connectivity. It’s pretty nice as an all-in-one solution and is available for download for PC, Mac and Linux. I spent about three weeks heavily using Digsby, so lets get right into the review shall we? If you want to skip to the end and download the client you can do so here – Download Digsby.

The install for Digsby PC was pretty straight forward with no co-branding (by way of advertising and toolbars) stuck in the install. Digsby is spware free, which is always nice!

The only step that differed during this install was the creation of a Digsby account. This account is used to manage all of your logins across all networks you choose to link to Digsby.

I’ve loaded the app, the login screen is pretty straight forward. There’s links to connection options, and forgotten passwords. Pretty much the standard in any IM client.

Once in the app, you will need to hit up the options to link all of your accounts.  Digsby supports all major IM clients, including AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Gmail/Jabber, ICQ, MSN, Facebook Chat. It would be nice if they supported Windows Communicator, but I’ll take what I can get – this app is definitely full featured.

After setup you have the option of having your social accounts and email appear at the bottom of your buddylist view (pictured above). In this view, when you click on each account, it opens within the app.

As far as usefulness goes, this app wins in spades. It’s awesome to be able to check my email on the fly, get notifications as it comes in via one app, rather than having one app per network. It’s a huge time saver and I managed to uninstall 4 apps in favor of Digsby.

The name of the game is consolidation, and the number of features is something else that should be commended. The App is built on Miranda IM, which is known to be the most light weight IM client available. The app loads extremely fast (dependent upon your skin), and uses limited resources on your comp which is always a plus.

The app is hugely customizable, with a ton of skins preloaded. Almost every setting within the app can be modified yourself. You can remove items from the IM boxes, such as your “actions bar”, or “formatting bar”.

Overall I’ts an app that will remain installed on my PC. I’m very happy with it’s performance and would love to make it my client of choice (hey Digsby, please release OTR!).

PRO’S:
* Some plussed for the app, it comes with some pretty nice skins from the get go.

* There’s no ads whatsoever. Always nice.

* Social media support within the app is extremely handy. It’s nice that i don’t have to keep a browser open to each of these social networks indvidually to post my updates. Having all of them in one app really saves a lot of time.

* The app is built on the Miranda IM client, which is known to be the most light weight / least processor intensive app within the IM space.

* All aspects of the list are customizable, from font, to buddy icon size, to the types of icons and extra data in your main buddylist window. I love this. I don’t know how many times I’ve wanted to shrink the space between the text and the buddy image in pidgin.

* Write email from the IM box. This is extremely handy, and works if you have your IM contacts set up w/ their email addresses.

* SMS from the IM box. I’ve been asked more than once where to SMS for free. Digsby has this feature built in. You can simply hit the SMS button and enter a number, and you will be texting with whomever you wanted from the IM box. AIM has this as well, but most people don’t know or don’t bother to use it.

* Camera option works even if the network doesn’t allow it. Digsby has a camera feature built in which actually streams your video to the web, and users can click a link to view your stream.

* Notifications for new messages, posts on social networks.

CONS:
* In the earlier builds Facebook chat often got disconnected. (This hasn’t happened much recently).

* No OTR. For those of you who use OTR in pidgin, unfortunately there’s no OTR support here. I can see this happening down the line, or Digsby offering up their own IM encryption down the line, but as of now it’s not part of the dealy.

* Notifications when you first log in can be slow. Definitely minor, but it exists.

If interested in Digsby (as you should be), feel free to give it a test drive and Download Digsby.

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