Technology seems to experience waves of proliferation and ensuing consolidation. In the gadget world it's called convergence: putting a camera in every cell phone. On the Internet, now that everyone has a million accounts on various social communities, life isn't as easy as checking your e-mail: you have to check your MySpace, your Facebook, your MyStarbucksIdea, etc. Now comes a wave of consolidation, tricks and tools for roping together your widely dispersed online life.
Digsby is a new application that looks at first like an IM client. And indeed it is a client for the major IM networks, but it can also hook into POP and IMAP accounts, as well as Facebook and MySpace.
For now, it's only in beta, and only for Windows, but OS X and Linux versions are promised soon. The installation process was a little slow and ugly, with Visual C++ 2005 windows popping up and .dll-related messages scrolling by. But the resulting application is pretty clean-looking and easy to use. Skinnable too, which I hear the kids like.
It's also considerably more responsive than Pidgin, my multi-IM client of choice, which suffers for using the GTK+ GUI API rather than Windows' native one.
Like an heir to biff, Digsby pops up a little notification panel when you get a new IM or e-mail or MySpace event. You can respond by typing in the pop-up. Depending on how you look at it, that either minimizes or maximizes the interruption potential.
You can send e-mail too, as well as perform little functions like "Mark as Read". Any e-mail client, of course, is drastically prone to feature bloat; it'll be interesting to watch that happen in future versions.
I am a freak from a bygone era, so I was unable to test out Digsby's social-networking features – please, somebody with the necessary accounts, try out that feature and report back. For now, Facebook and MySpace are the only supported networks, but more are promised soon.
Digsby is free to download, but it's released under a proprietary license.
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