Chat with all your IM Clients, keep track of your social networks and email: Digsby build 15142 (beta)

Digsby build 15142 (beta)
http://www.digsby.com

There are TONS of social networking sites and various chat tools out there right now...it can be downright overwhelming. Not only that, but you have to load all the chat tools for each network if you want to stay in touch with your friends.

There are other tools out there that can consolidate your IM networks - Trillian and Pidgin come to mind, and there are other hacks you can use to trick a single chat client to talk to all of them, but none of these are quite like Digsby.

Digsby is a 'new on the scene' chat consolidation app that not only puts all of your popular IM networks in one place, but also helps you keep track of a couple (more are coming) social networking sites, like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Digsby can also help you keep tabs on your web-email inbox as well.


(Paraphrased from the Digsby website)

Instant Messaging:

• One combined buddy list for all your AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber, and Facebook Chat Accounts.
• Manage multiple conversations with tabbed conversation windows. You can drag tabs out into their own windows for important conversations.
• If one of your friends has more than one IM account you can combine them into a single merged contact to eliminate duplicate buddies.
• Send your friends SMS messages right from the IM window.
• The InfoBox lets you check everyone's status message and profile just by moving your mouse down the list.
• Log conversation history and find the information you need our search-enabled log viewer.
• And so much more.

Email:

• Manage your Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM Mail, IMAP, and POP accounts right from digsby.
• Get popup notifications when new email arrives. Clicking a popup takes you right to the message with auto-login into webmail accounts.
• The email InfoBox gives you a snapshot of your unread messages with just one click
• Perform actions such as "Mark as Read" or "Report Spam" right from the email InfoBox.\
• Send emails to your friends right from the IM window. The email is sent directly from any account digsby is tracking for you.

Social Networking:

• Stay up to date with everything happening on your Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace account (other network support coming soon).
• Receive alerts of events such as new friend requests, messages, group invites, etc.
• The social network InfoBox gives you a real time NewsFeed of what your friends are up to. Everything from new photos, to status updates, to upcoming birthdays is just a click away.
• Set your Facebook and Twitter status right from Digsby.

Other:

• Digsby offers complete synchronization between computers and installations. Everything from the skin you chose to your pre-defined status messages follows you from place to place.
• Manage multiple simultaneous file transfers from one simple transfer manager.

There are more features that I did not list, but those were the highlights (and there are a lot!).


More screenshots here

This isn't yet up to Pidgin standards when it comes to support for multiple IM networks, but, Digsby definitely does have enough features where it can become a good alternative for those of us who like Digsby's features, but don't use all those other Pidgin-capable networks.

I did like the ability to view my friends twits and FaceBook updates through this interface, and the email notifiers are very visually appealing. Don't be surprised when you see an additional 4 or 5 (depending on what you set up) notifier icons in your Systray - you can turn these off, thankfully... Also, the ability to hover over a contact to view their specific network status was pretty cool - you can see some information here that you normally wouldn't be privvied to.

One more password...

You will have to create a Digsby account (hooray, one more password!) to run the client, but this is for account synchronization functions...so, you can install the client on another computer and all your settings (even down to the skin, according to the feature-list) are brought to your other installation - which admittedly, is pretty cool, especially if you have to rebuild your computer for some reason or another.