The Next Killer App : Digsby IM Client

A Friend of mine told me about Digsby and I’ve been testing it for about a week now, and I have to say it is very very impressive. Till now I was using Pidgin as my choice of IM client. But in comparison to Digsby Pidgin falls very short. The Social Network features of it is simply amazing and the best thing is that it has been beautifully integrated.

Well Digsby is a multiprotocol IM client that lets you chat with all your friends on AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber with one simple to manage buddy list. Couple that with an EMail integration never seen before on an IM client that allows you to mark emails as spam, delete them and throw away some social networking features you have a winner. And Digsby does exactly that..

The IM features are more or less the same you would find in any other multiprotocol IM client like Pidgin, so I won’t mention it here. But instead I’ll focus on the email integration and the social networking stuff over here.

Well here are a few notable features of the email integration :

• Supports Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, POP and IMAP mail accounts.
• Login to multiple accounts from the same network at once!
• Separation of email and IM account – for example, you can set a Yahoo account for email notification but not for instant messaging use. How cool is that!
• Send email from a chat window – right click on a buddy name (online or offline), select a sender account and send him an email! Now who needs a browser?
• Perform actions such as “Mark as Read” or “Report Spam” right from the Digsby interface.

Most of this features in Digsby means that I would need to login to my email inbox 90% of the time, simple because I can do most of the stuff from Digsby itself. Here is a screenshot of Digsby’s email integration in action :

Right now the social networking features aren’t all that compelling, limited to Facebook and Myspace only. In future I’d like to see Twitter integration as well and support for other social networks.  You can get updates Friend Requests, Feeds, and other events directly on Digsby. Here’s a screenshot of the social networking features in action :

Right now Digsby is available only with an invite. So If you are looking to give Digsby a try then go ahead and download it from here and use dlsquad as the invite code during registration.Now if you are looking for something like this, then I strongly suggest you give it a try.

Special thanks to Download Squad for the invite.