The Green Blob Rules Them All

Do you have trouble keeping in touch with all your friends? Well, opening a browser to go on Facebook chat, Yahoo! chat and going on AIM and MSN doesn’t make things too easy for one person either. In fact, it sounds very tedious to keep track of all your chats in four different places. But it doesn’t have to be that difficult, because Digsby can combine all your chat clients into one program without additional functions or hassles.

Digsby was developed by dotSyntax, LLC in 2008, advertising its adoring logo, an amusing blob with a green and orange hat mounted on Manhattan trash cans. The program itself took time before it was fully released. Nevertheless, it is a very functional multi-chat client that could run almost any chat client, from AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Facebook chat, Jabber, Google Talk to ICQ. It is also very user friendly, fully customizable and provides many tools to satisfy a user’s needs.

Digsby’s multi-client function allows users to keep in touch with all their contacts from social networks with ease. Unlike other chat clients such as Trillian and Pidgin, which are also multi-client, Digsby provides extensive uses such as providing updates and alerts from the most popular social networking Web sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

Because the program has multi-client functions, it is also very organized and easy to manage. Digsby provides an easy-preference section to add/remove whichever accounts a user desires, and also allows users to easily connect and disconnect from each username. There is also a dropdown menu, which provides ways of being available, offline, invisible and away.

Other preferences are provided in the “tools” section on the menu bar, giving the users customization in all places such as the chat windows, buddy-list layout and modifying privacy, conversation, skins, profile, widgets, notification and status settings. The preference menu is organized and neatly categorized for a user-friendly look, and gives access to all necessary program changes.

The graphic user interface and default style of the buddy list and chat window is clean, sleek and versatile. Buddies can be categorized by name, service or status, while their status icons are shown in different colors to indicate whether they are away, idle, online or on a mobile phone. The chat window provides various buttons to allow video chatting, file transferring, e-mailing and SMS. The program’s functionality also comes with simple yet smooth sounds for online/offline buddies and instant messages. Nevertheless, the layout is not cluttered, and important information is always visible.

Digsby has been monitored by developers to ensure that problems are fixed, which is why the chat client hardly has bugs and hardly ever crashes. It is also free of charge and available on Windows, Mac and Linux.

The installation file is 18 MB, and with all the customization and ease from Digsby, the program is a whopping size of more than 60 MB when installed. However, the memory usage has been quite low since the first few releases of the program, which is a plus.

To use Digsby, however, it also requires a user to create a Digsby account and manage his or her other screen names and services from Digsby. Therefore, user information is not stored locally, unlike Pidgin, AIM and Trillian.

Still, even with its large file size after installation, Digsby is extremely useful, extensive and customizable, and does its best at helping people communicate through the Web without the nuisance of going on every single Web site or chat client individually. Therefore, Digsby is a good addition for anyone who wants to keep track of friends and social-network statuses, or even for regular basis chatting online.

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