Digsby

I love Digsby.

Where to chat online has always been a problem for me. I loved the beauty, cleanness and simplicity of IRC - but it lacked a few of the features I'd like from a chat client - and had a userbase exclusively made up of geeks.


_IRC

I went to MSN (later Windows Live) Messenger for a while, but the only thing that ever kept me there was the userbase (and lack of decent third party clients for it, only Trillian came close). I mean, sure I could chat to anyone I wanted, but was it really worth it when the chat client was so bloated and poorly customisable?

No.

Google Talk was my next choice, and had some great features - such as Twitter integration, a built in chat window on my inbox and a return to simplicity. The chat window had somewhere to enter text, somewhere to display text, and not a lot else. Great...but only a handful of my friends used it.

Then, along came...


_{Does this remind you of the Ammo from Superfrog?}

Digsby!

Digsby allows you to fully customise how it looks, where it goes on your page, where notifications come up, how notifications come up, what notifications come up - beautiful. Although, a lot of the defaults are sensible and quite pretty too.

Furthermore, it allows you to connect to pretty much any IM network you want (most of them through the Jabber protocol, and then a few that don't follow standards such as MSN Messenger too). This is all slick and seamless, and you never have to even care what network people are on when you talk to them. You can give your contacts nicknames (to hide the crap they generally put as 'display name', and group them together as you wish.

There's also support for Facebook, pretty much any email service and my beloved twitter too! I can find out who's dating who, send a tweet about it, get an email in return and delete that email all from one little auto-hiding window at the right hand side of my screen! Then, I can get a flood of messages from people on Messenger, Google Talk and others telling me I shouldn't gossip. Brilliant!

I highly recommend you go try Digsby now. You can turn on only the features you want, so don't be worried you'll just get spammed by messages all day..

You can even get yourself a Digsby Widget (like the one now on the side of my blog - go try it out), which functions like the Google Talk ChatBack I used to have, but works right there on the page, and is a lot slicker from my end.