My Thoughts by R.E. Fort

While this may sounds like an advertisement for software it’s really not. I recently found and added a new tool to my website that has got to be one of the coolest things I have seen for chat and communications in sometime. The tool is called Digsby and you will find it on my main page allowing you to chat with me if I am online. Why do I feel this tool stands out above some of the other multi-platform chat tools you may ask? Well it’s that it also services your E-mail and lot of the social networks services as well. Now for those that know me, they realize I have been on the web well, since the beginning of the web. So I have lots of instant messaging, social network and e-mail accounts. One problem I have run into recently is trying to keep track of LinkedIn, Tagged, two Myspace accounts, Facebook, Twitter, MSN, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, Google talk a host of e-mail address and whatever new IM or social network is released in the next thirty seconds that catches my eye. Yes I know I have an issue or two.

So for a long time I ran and I still think it’s pretty great a program Trillian. Yes named after the girl in the great book (yes it was a book before movie) Hitchhikers Guide to the galaxy (Don’t Panic). This program like Digsby is free and well that’s normally enough for me to try it out. It supports pretty much all of the IM services other then Google Talk and Skype maybe a few others but the big three AIM, MSN and Yahoo are covered and very well too. It gives you one application to run and talk to all of your friends. It also can monitor e-mail on those accounts, which is pretty cool.

Now in comes my new friend Digsby, this little guy does all of that then it adds access to most of Social network, wish it also covered Tagged but oh well. It checks e-mail and not only tells you there is a new message but it interacts with them depending on the service. And speaking about service that e-mail option, well it covers POP and IMAP e-mail as well, Very Cool stuff. Out the box without modification it supports LinkedIn, Twitter, Myspace and Facebook for social networks then it adds AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Jabber and Facebook Chat also giving you the ability to have multiple accounts on all of the above. Now for those that have more than one account this is huge. The hands down winner for me, was the ability to embed in my own website a chat box. Now there have been many tools to do this in the past and present like Yahoo and I believe a few others but nothing I have seen like this. The widget simply opens a chat box where you place it. So your website visitor is not taken to another site they stay right on your page. They simply enter a name and start talking to me if I am on line. That jumped the coolness factor for me almost off the charts what can I say I still have pretty high standards.

Ok downsides, well while it does all of that it is a little bit of a memory hog. I find that if it’s in the process of checking one of my POP email accounts and say my Palm Treo 700p (look for a blog one day on Palm Phones my favorites) is checking or getting e-mail it will fail but it will reconnect. While MSN and AIM and I believe Yahoo support VOIP or Voice chat it only seems to support video and audio. Hey there are times I just don’t want you to see me. I hear rumors about support for Skype and once that happens WOW I will be happy. I did find on my trip to Chicago a few issues with connecting across open networks with my laptop but that was firewall stuff at the different locations I Other than that this program gets 8.5 out of 10 where Trillian I am sliding down to 7.5.

There is your tech news for the week.