Five Reasons to Love: Digsby

Digsby is a program that integrates instant messaging, e-mail notifications and social networking actions. I downloaded Digsby a little over a month ago, and never expected that I would come to love / rely on it as much as I have….

Here are my TOP FIVE* reasons for being a “raving fan” of Digsby:

1. I can be online with multiple screen names from multiple services. That means I can be signed onto several GChat accounts AND with several AIM names AND facebook chat. (It also supports MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, and Jabber, but I don’t use any of those…)
2. It manages my instant messages and notifies me when I get new e-mails as well as updates to my twitter feeds and activity from my linkedin and facebook contacts!
3. Just like me, all my friends have multiple accounts (AIM, GMail, Facebook) – Here, I can merge them into one “contact”. (Yay for no duplicates!)
4. My chat history is saved, which is pretty much a standard feature of instant messaging clients nowadays, but what I love even more is that for GChat, my chat history is saved within GMail, just as it would have been had I been using GChat itself.
5. I can sort my buddy list in a variety of ways. I’m still playing around to find the best way to sort my buddy list… I’m torn between sorting by status (available, idle, away) and then by name OR sorting by status and then by service (GMail, AIM).

*I started writing down ALL the reasons I love Digsby but then the post got too long and boring, but EVERY DAY I discover some new little trick that makes me appreciate the program more and more.

Hopefully, I’ve convinced you to check it out. It’s really a great tool! (For those already using Digsby, I’d be interested in hearing tips and tricks you’ve learned or if you have any gripes you’d like to share…)

cat and mouse

me (12:24:35 PM): “wehn the cat’s out of town, the mice come out to play”
my friend (12:24:49 PM): when the cats away the mice will play

I hope everyone enjoys my version of the saying. Good thing I have friends like Andrea who also sit online all day to help me figure out what I’m trying to say. I was telling her that my boss and the other person in my department are both out on vacation today and all of next week, so I feel like I should somehow take advantage of this situation. The thing is that I’m really lucky and work independently even when they are here, so it’s not a major change. But still, it’s that same feeling as when your parents go out of town and you are dying to have a huge party because you can, but people aren’t around, or there’s something else going on. And it feels like a wasted opportunity. As a result, I’m updating this from work, which isn’t something I would usually do, so at least I’m doing something.

The other thing that’s been making me laugh recently is the AIM and internship relationship. I have friends who are scared to sign online, and others who literally just sit at work and have conversations all day. I’m somewhere in between. I believe in the philosophy of, “it’s better to ask forgiveness, then permission”. If they have a problem with it, they’ll let me know. At my old job, everyone was always online and it was a good way of communicating rather than sending a thousand short e-mails. Here, I just found out one of my co-workers’ screen name yesterday… It’s a little embarrasing when a IM pops up while someone is at my cubicle, but hey, it happens.