I just found this amazing plug-in available for Pidgin called gSMS which sends you SMS notifications whenever someone leaves a message for you on Pidgin and you aren’t able to respond to it within a specified time frame. This could be particularly useful if you need to step away from your desk but you are expecting an important message. By configuring this amazing plug-in, you can be notified by SMS that the person left a message. With this you can get back to them as soon as possible.

While the plugin does its job pretty well, but it isn’t doing anything fancy. The SMS, which is sent via Google Calendar, doesn’t give you the actual text of the message. It just sends the name of the contact and the date / time the message was sent. While you are away if multiple contacts leave messages for you, they will be all packed together and sent to you in one SMS. How Sweet!

Well here is how you get gSMS to work for you..

• Ofcourse you need Pidgin installed
• A Google account (with SMS reminders enabled on Google Calendar).
• Your mobile phone network needs to be supported by Google.
• Your PC synched with NTP (Network Time Protocol). To get your Windows PC Synced with NTP right click the clock in the system tray and activate Internet time.

Now that you have met all the prerequisites now go ahead and  download the plugin and place the gsms.dll file in the Pidgin plugins folder on your PC (Normally C:\Program Files\Pigdin\Plugins). Open Pidgin navigate to the Tools menu and select Plugins. Activate gSMS and configure it to your liking. Screenshot below……

Leave the Calendar feed path to /private/full and configure the rest of the options to your hearts liking. I suggest you choose the timeout appropriately because if you receive a lot of messages, then if you decide to attend to the call of the nature, you might as well be bombarded with text messages. I am sure you don’t want that.

Via Makeuseof

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.