13:20 by FoxTwo
Digsby The Multi-Protocol Wonder
I'm sure you, like many people, have friends on IM platforms, be it MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ or whatever. And, I'm sure not all of them are (conveniently) on the same platform. You'd have some on MSN, some on AIM etc.
It wasn't till very recently that the 2 largest IM networks, MSN and Yahoo, decided to finally "work together" and allow their users to cross-talk to each other, using the latest versions of their client. Even so, there are some lazy or blissfully ignorant users out there who don't know they need to upgrade to the latest version of their respective choice of clients before they can talk to their friends on the other network. Or maybe they know but they don't want to upgrade.
What we could do to accommodate these type of users is to get a multi-protocol IM client, ie a piece of software that will log you onto the various networks that you may be on, all at the same time. This way, you can talk to all your friends from all the different networks. 2 examples of the more well-known multi-protocol clients would be Trillian and Miranda.
Now, gaze upon a relatively new entrant to this arena - Digsby, The Wonder Client! In my opinion, Digsby is THE client to have. It sports support for MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, AIM, Jabber and Googletalk protocols, for starters.
One pretty neat feature of Digsby as opposed to other multi-protocol clients out there is the ability to merge "duplicate" entries into one. You will definitely have friends who are like you - have an account in each of the networks. So, if you drag your friend's Yahoo account over to his MSN account, Digsby will merge these 2 into 1 entry on your buddy list! Don't worry, when your friend logs in on either network, you'll be notified like always. It doesn't stop at just 2, too. You can keep dragging his account from any of the supported networks, and it'll merge them all into just 1 entry.
The other usual features are skin support, avatars ("Display Picture" in MSN-speak), fonts etc. But, what takes cake, is support for SOCIAL NETWORKING! Yes, it checks Facebook, Myspace and Twitter! Now, I don't have Myspace, but it's ok. Digsby checks my Facebook and Twitter at regular intervals of about 10 mins. Unfortunately you can't control the interval right now. What is cool is that you can update your Twitter from inside Digsby itself!
Yes, I have been thinking of either getting a twitter client or installing a plug-in for MSN that allows Twitter. Now along comes Digsby and I am thinking I'm going to use this one long-term from now on.
Also, a nice bonus is that Winamp support apparently is built-in. As soon as you play a song on it, your "status" on Digsby changes to reflect the Artist-Title, just like on MSN or Yahoo.
Yes Digsby really works! It even allows you to chat with me via the "Chat With Me!" selection on the sidebar of this page. If you see a green man icon beside it now, it means I'm online in MSN Network.
Labels: facebook, internet, messaging, MSN, social networking, twitter
21:52 by FoxTwo I must be really free today, it being a Sunday and all. I should be saving London from the demon hordes, yet here I am surfing all over the Internet and just lazily clicking stuff, until....
.... I came across this post on this blog here. In it, the writer talked about how he was getting rid of his shoutbox and replacing it with this new code - a web-based, one to one Windows Live Messenger window, directly to him.
After seeing how he did it, I did a quick mod of the HTML code as presented on the Microsoft website, and made it into a popup chat window. After all, I think my blog sidebars are already pretty dang full, and I don't want to add anything huge right now.
So, I made a new link and put it into my left sidebar, right under the "Email Me" link. Notice the cute little icon of a man? The cool thing is that the tiny little picture of the man you see there actually shows my status - green for online, and grey for offline. The only problem with web-based IM apps is that, well, you can't send me messages when I'm not online.
Go on, give it a click... cool eh? Well, I guess this is the next best thing to having a shoutbox like ping.sg...
Ok I guess you guys wanna see it in action huh? Ok, for one day only, limited time offer, here it is in this blog post - see below:
So, what do you think? Yeah well it's too big to fit into my sidebar anyway, being 300 pixels wide... I guess you could alter the code to make it slimmer, but I was too lazy. Besides, I have already written the javascript code for a popup window, and I'm definitely too lazy to go back and change it all again to make it fit into my sidebar.
Looking at ping.sg's history, people would prefer a popup window anyway :) That's why the "standalone shoutbox" was an almost instant hit among all the regular visitors to the website.
Labels: internet, messaging, MSN, shoutbox
