In the past I’ve searched for that all-in-one solution for organizing my reach across the web.  None of them has ever lived up to the hype, until now.

Digsby is an information Swiss Army Knife.  It keeps your various IM accounts, Email accounts, and Social Networks in one easy to use place.  My installation is keeping track of five email accounts, facebook, and twitter messages.

Four of those email accounts are on gmail.  Digsby allows me to go straight to the inbox or message for any of them without having to logout of one account and then into another.  In the past I tried to use an imap client for organization and really felt it was more trouble than it was worth.  This program allows me to keep them separate, but with central notifications.  This has been much easier for me to work with and fits my workflow better.

Whenever a new message is detected a configurable popup displays the subject and who its from.  By clicking on the popup your taken directly to the email message.  I’d prefer to be taken to the inbox since the gmail message view doesn’t allow deletion without going to the inbox first, then back to the message.  One thing Digsby does do in regards to this is allow you to single click on the icon in the system tray for that account, and delete the message without visiting the host.  This can be very handy if you never intend to read the message anyway.

For IM Digsby really is on par with the other multi account IM applications out there.  I have accounts on both Yahoo! and Microsoft Live so it’s nice having them together in one interface.  Honestly I don’t use IM much so I can’t speak to this program being better than any other for this feature.  They advertise the ability to handle simultaneous downloads across networks but I haven’t utilized this feature at all.

The Social Network integration is well done.  My only complaint is that it doesn’t act as a push client for twitter.  It checks for messages every few minutes which isn’t bad but I’d much prefer instant reception.  That said, I like the way it handles the messages and I’ve been able to quit using my other desktop twitter client.  I’m new to Facebook but it seems to handle the < as there from ease with>

If your looking for an all-in-one client I would encourage you to give Digsby a try. It’s still in beta (isn’t everything nowadays) but it’s a polished and well executed solution.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 12th, 2008 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Article. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.