Digsby takes connectivity to a higher level
by Celine Roque
I’ve recently featured the fantastic Nutshellmail, a social networking aggregator that keeps your social media life in control. It provides a simple yet effective way to manage your various accounts by sifting through everything and sending you scheduled summaries thru email. Definitely a great idea for people who want to stay connected but don’t fancy social networking taking over their lives.
The question is, how about those for whom social networking is not a mere diversion but an essential/central component of their work? These people might need to get real-time updates to be able to respond to clients, so having scheduled daily digests just won’t cut it. A desktop application called Digsby could solve the problem. It’s an even more feature-packed aggregator – one that combines social networking, Twitter, emails AND instant messaging in one program.
With it, you can stay updated on Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, and Twitter, as well as chat with your friends on Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ, MSN, Jabber, and Facebook Chat. It can also access your emails so you can be notified instantly of incoming messages. It’s free to download and I’m glad to say it installed on my Windows 7 Beta PC without any hitch. Adding different social network accounts was a simple matter of providing my credentials for each. So far, Digsby has been running smoothly without any errors.
There are chat clients out there like Trillian and Pigdin, but as of now only Digsby offers social media support. When it detects new updates from Twitter, for example, a small pop-up will appear at the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, flashing the tweet for a few seconds. You can also read a list of the most recent updates for each social networking and email account:
Be careful to uncheck some options during installation if you don’t like the program to change your homepage or install any other “freebies”. This being a desktop application and not a web app, you might need administrator rights on your office PC to install it. This limitation might make this tool more appropriate for telecommuters and other mobile workers who have full control over their workstations. Some people have complained that Digsby could have been more useful had the program included RSS support, and they have a point, but maybe that’s a little bit of overkill. Anyway, I’m happy to check my feeds via Google Reader, which has a lot of great features just for RSS. Lastly, anyone’s who has tried it will know that instant messaging can be time-waster, and along with constant updates from social networks, one might lose a lot of productive hours on Digsby. As in everything else, one must practice prudence and self-restraint.
