Trying Digsby..

For as long as I can remember I've been fighting problems like having to have two Live Messenger accounts to keep business and personal contacts seperate. Live Messenger doesn't allow you to have more than one instance, and therefore more than one account signed in per machine at one time. However, with a patch like A-Patch, you can get around this, which is what I've been doing all these years. I guess you are waiting for a "but" and this is what it is. Live messenger is quite a bit of a resource hog at the best of times, but needing two seperate instances open really eats into your system resources, and add to this all the other clients like Google chats, ICQs etc, and then you have all the social networking tools for Facebook and Twitter etc like Tweetdeck, and the machine is almost on it's knees..

Well it seems my wishes were granted on behalf of a free application called Digsby. I'm not going to jump to any forgone conclusion as I've only been using it a day, but so far I'm thoroughly impressed. Now I get all my communications coming through the single client which uses very little resources.

What's very impressive is the little extra features they have added, such as on the side of my website you can now see a chat applet that shows you when I'm around allows you to contact me through my site. (I have the right to ignore you by the way. Just the nature of being busy).

What this boils down to is that "I can be everywhere without needing to be all over the place!". That would probably make a good tag line for Digsby!

Hopefully at some point I'll write up something more about its pro's and con's. I have noticed two con's so far. Firstly is that the Live Messenger implementation doesn't support the new ability to be logged in on more than one machine at a time. Pitty, though expected.. And secondly that your status is set across the board, and not just for single accounts etc, although this won't affect me much.

You can get more info and download this tool from: www.digsby.com.

What I find interesting in my response to such an application is a greater appreciation of the side of forthcoming applications like Google Wave. Not only everything in one place, but richer functionality and a more immediate response.


Interesting
Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:50