Digsby Does It All…Almost

Digsby is a new application that functions as a universal instant messaging client but also integrates with facebook and MySpace and your email! On the IM side, the app gives you one combined buddy list for all your AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber Accounts. You can manage multiple conversations with tabbed conversation windows and you can even send your friends SMS messages right from the IM window. Digsby also lets you manage your Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM Mail, IMAP, and POP accounts get popup notifications when new email arrives. When you click a popup, you will be taken right to the message with auto-login into webmail accounts.

And last but not least, Digsby also helps you stay up to date with everything happening on your Facebook or MySpace account. You can receive alerts of events like new friend requests, messages, group invites, etc. You can also get a real time NewsFeed of what your friends are up to which includes everything from new photos, to status updates, and to upcoming birthdays. The only thing the software doesn’t work with is twitter (the horror!), but they might add that at some point since they hint that more social networks will be supported soon. Digsby is private beta now, so you’ll need an invite to download it.

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

There is a new version of Mahalo Follow, a toolbar provided by human-powered search site Mahalo: Mahalo Follow 3.1 Beta for Firefox. The toolbar suggests Mahalo pages in a sidebar that are related to pages that you’re viewing in your browser. You can also use Mahalo Follow to quickly recommend links to Mahalo. Links you recommend can also be automatically posted to Twitter, Jaiku, Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks, StumbleUpon, Facebook, or your Tumblr blog. You can access your last 20 recommended links as well as the last 20 recommended links by your friends right from the Follow toolbar. Even though the tool’s purpose is to get you to help Mahalo out by sending in useful links, it does so by making their submission tool something useful to you. Just the fact that one tool can post to all those social networking/bookmarking sites at once makes it a tempting download. (How do I not have a Twitter Firefox something yet?)

8hands is a new desktop client that lets you keep up with your friends on social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, and flickr. With 8hands, you can get the updates from all of those sites from the convenience of a desktop client. If you want to visit one of the social network’s websites, you just have to click the icon for that service and 8hands will launch your preferred web browser. If you already use a desktop client for Twitter, 8hands can replace that, but it does not have an easy way to reply to tweets or tinyurl integration, so you would have to give those features up. If your friends also download and use 8hands, you can launch IM chat sessions with them.

8hands is currently Windows only, but Mac support is coming soon. Also, expect to see more supported networks in the future, including Friendster, Bebo, Last.fm, and Xango. (Via Download Squad)

  Social.im is a new instant messaging client that lets you chat with your Facebook contacts over a variety of IM networks.  Even though your friends are spread across several different IM networks like Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Google, etc., Social.im is betting on the fact that most of them are on Facebook. What makes Social.im different than other Facebook apps is that you don’t run it in the browser - it’s actually a standalone application that logs into Facebook, whether or not your browser window is open. Your friends on Facebook also have to download and install Social.im in order for you to chat with them, which may be a drawback. Not everyone wants to install additional software on their PC…even if you do! It would be nice if your friends had the option to either chat with you via a web browser window or the standalone app. As far as IM apps go, Social.im is pretty basic - no video, no file sharing, no voice. However, its Facebook integration lets you check your new Facebook messages, pokes, friend requests, and wall posts via buttons at the bottom of the IM client. Clicking the buttons opens up a web browser window and takes you to the requested page. Currently, Social.im only works on Windows, but a Mac version is supposed to be arriving soon.

Fuser is a service that unifies your inboxes, allowing you to aggregate your mail from various inboxes as well as from social networks into one place. Your unified email is then available on the Fuser homepage as a quick snapshot or you can view your entire Fuser inbox(es) and even organize your mail into folders from within the Fuser service. And now, in the spirit of integration, Fuser has released a new Facebook application that lets you view your MySpace messages, comments, and bulletins without leaving Facebook. You can even display your MySpace comments as a separate wall on your Facebook profile! Unfortunately, you cannot yet reply to the messages, nor does the Facebook app integrate any of your other email or social network accounts you may have added previously using the Fuser service. However, in the future, some of those features may be coming, which would make Fuser a real killer app! (Via Mashable)

Facebook launched a great new feature today that is sure to make it stand out from any social network out there - yes, even MySpace; the feature is called friends lists. On the new Friends Page, you can create named lists of friends and organize your Facebook friends into groups in ways that have meaning for you. You can have “internet friends,” “work friends,” “best friends,” etc. or whatever else you want! Using these private lists, you can message people, send group or event invitations, and even filter updates from certain groups of friends. Now you really have control over how much of your personal life you are sharing and with who! Thanks, Facebook. I now officially forgive you for that Beacon mess.

By the way, if I refused your Facebook request before saying that I was only going to use Facebook for people I knew in real life, I’ve completely changed my mind now that I can categorize my friends here  - feel free to re-add me as a friend - I will accept your request now. Just fill in the details saying your a blog reader so I’ll know how we know each other. However, I will still ask for details before accepting friend requests…just in case it’s spam.

I just saw this article which made me really appreciate being a T-Mobile customer. Research in Motion (RIM), makers of the popular Blackberry mobile devices, announced that they will introduce new software that will let Blackberry users automatically retrieve their Facebook messages on their Blackberry, just as easily and as quickly as other email is received. In addition, the software will let you wirelessly send and view Facebook photos, pokes, and wall posts. T-Mobile will be the first wireless carrier to get this new application.

Talkster, the makers of a cool VoIP app, have now released a Facebook application. The original Talkster app lets users make free calls over the internet, but, unlike other VoIP apps like Skype, Talkster users make free calls to voice-enabled IM services. From your web-enabled mobile phone, you can call some on your IM buddy list. From the Information Week article on this app, Talkster gets rave reviews:

Talkster pushes the VoIP envelope in the direction of presence, the ability to see whether the person you want to communicate with is online, and how. Once you’ve set up your voice IM contacts in Talkster, you can see your buddies’ presence information from your mobile phone’s browser. (Talkster does this without installing any software on your phone, either.) …Talkster’s technology has an immediate benefit — it lets you pick the least expensive way to reach your contacts — and it’s got long-term potential as well, because voice communications are moving away from reliance on the 10-digit telephone number and over to Web 2.0 addressing schemes, such as IM handles that can be resolved to IP addresses. Talkster is positioning itself for the future.

Now, with the Facebook application, you can use Talkster and the Free World Dialing application to make free calls to friends or groups of friends from your mobile, your home phone or wherever. To get started, just add the application, send your friend(s) an invitation, and start calling immediately.

On Friday, the Google News blog announced the launch of the Google News Application for Facebook. This app lets you create custom sections of new content or you can select from a set of pre-defined content to create a Google News page of your own that you can access through your Facebook profile. The stories on your Google News pages can then be browsed and shared with your friends. To share a story, you click the “share” button and then the content can either be emailed to your friends using Facebook’s mail program or you can share it on your profile.

(via Google News Blog: Google News goes social)

FriendVox, an IM application for the popular social network, Facebook, has now officially launched. The app offers buddy lists, presence indicators, online and offline messaging, plus integration with other Facebook features, like status updates and friend requests. To use FriendVox, you have to go to the FriendVox website and click the Facebook button in order to login. Once your buddy list has launched, you can start an IM session just like you would in any other IM client. However, as Mashable reports, there is a slight delay in the posting of messages and there is no widget you can put on your Facebook profile; but this may be change in the future, so the app is worth watching.