Yesterday, I was experiencing major difficulties with my instant messaging client, Pidgin (Mac - Adium). Among other issues, I couldn’t connect to my AIM account and the IRC client was buggy. Pidgin has had me worried the last couple months, especially after the developer quarrel about “when entering text, should the input field automatically expand or should a scrollbar appear”. This incredibly trivial and minute disagreement caused Pidgin to be split up into two different versions, which is just stupid. Read the story here. Anyways, I set out to scour the web in search of a new IM client that could support multiple protocols. I found Digsby.  

Digsby is an incredible application that I can’t consciously classify as an instant messaging client. Instead, Digsby plays in a league of its own; that league shall be called “Social Utilities”. Even with that categorical promotion, Digsby is not done justice. When you install Digsby, Windows XP/Vista, OS X, and Linux, you are asked to create an account to use Digsby; this is required. The Digsby account tells Digsby who you are (obviously) and also synchronizes your settings, profiles, contacts, services and more.When Digsby is launched, you’re asked to sign in with you Digsby account. Once logged in, you can add you IM services, AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, and Facebook Chat are supported, email accounts, Gmail, AIM/AOL, Yahoo!, MS, and industry standard pop/imap are supported, and your social networks, as of today only Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are supported. While in my opinion the social networks that Digsby can connect to are limited, the software is still a beta.

The Digsby buddy list is completely customizable. You can change just about everything, ranging from the appearance of avatars and statuses to which social networks and email accounts are displayed in the buddy list. A feature that I welcomed in Digsby was skinnable chats.  There are about 20 different skins that you can apply to the Digsby chat windows, and with each of the skins there is a huge host of color schemes. The great thing about this is that these preferences are synced across multiple Digsby clients with your Digsby account. Notifications are standard in any instant messaging client, but Digsby raises the bar. Digsby allows the user, as with most applications, to set which events trigger an alert and whether that alert should be auditory, visual, or both. The Digsby alerts for social networks and email are fairly standard. They show the subject of the email and a brief snippet of the email itself; clicking the notification opens the email. For social networks, the same basically applies, although Twitter notifications are slightly different. They show the user and the update and clicking the popup opens the post on twitter.com. IM notifications are where Digsby goes above and beyond. How many times have you been in the middle of doing something on the computer, but in a different application that your IM client? With Digsby, the IM notification pops up in the corner of your screen and tells you who’s messaging you and what they said. Underneath that, is a text field where you can reply to the IM without leaving you current application. I find this to be a timesaver and I’m really happy that such a feature has been included.

 Digsby is lacking only two features that pose a slight inconvenience. There is no IRC support, which Pidgin has, but the problem was reminded through the use of Chatzilla. Secondly, the social networks Digsby can access are limited and I would like to see others like Friendfeed added. 

All in all, Digsby is the best social utility/IM client on the web and it has earned the position of default IM client on my PC. Considering that Digsby is beta software, I look forward to see what it puts out next to defend its title of the world’s best IM client. (And I know I’m going to get some comments from people who swear by something else, but hey this is my opinion and if you’ve got a problem with that move along)

 Hit me up with a comment below or emailor IM. (The link might not work so IM with the screenname bakere19 on AIM)

 UPDATE 8/15/08 @8:12 EST  - Fixed code appearance in paragraph 2.