Digsby Messenger

Build 45 - “Welcome, You’ve Got Mail”

2008-12-31T10:03:00.001-08:00

We just pushed a new release (Build 45, r19635) to all users. This release includes all features, bug fixes and enhancements in Builds 44 and 45 on our Change Log. Notable changes include:

Added support for the new Yahoo Mail Platform. Those who have switched over and are using the “Yahoo Mail Classic” interface should now have email notifications again
Completed full support for the new Gmail authentication system including auto-login to multiple accounts

If you experience any bugs please use “Help > Send Bug Report” in the main menu to submit a diagnostic log or email us at bugs@digsby.com. If you have any suggestions, please email us at features@digsby.com.

As always, thank you for all the feedback and enjoy the new build. Remember to invite your friends to use Digsby via Email or Facebook.

Build 44 - Private Alpha Release

2008-12-31T10:02:00.004-08:00

We just pushed an update to alpha testers (Build 44, r19608) which introduces full support for the new Gmail authentication system along with bug fixes for two bugs we introduced in the last release. As always, you can read the entire list of new features, bug fixes, and enhancements on our Change Log.

As always, thank you for all the feedback and enjoy the new build. Remember to invite your friends to use Digsby via Email or Facebook.

Build 43 - Friday Treats

2008-12-31T10:02:00.003-08:00

We just pushed Build 43 to all users. This includes all users who are running extremely old releases that have not been updated since last May. If you have trouble with the auto-update, download the installer directly here:

http://update.digsby.com/install/digsby_setup.exe

The release pushed out today to all users includes all the features, bug fixes and enhancements in Builds 38, 39, 40, and 41 on our Change Log. Notable changes include:

Implemented a completely new method of load balancing and authentication. This will help us continue to scale reliably.
Fixed Gmail/ICQ connectivity due to protocol changes. Gmail will not have auto-login for now but we will bring back the functionality
Implemented a new version of TokBox for a better audio/video chat experience. Just click the “Video” button at the top of the IM window
Added support for complex languages such as Arabic and Thai
Fixed numerous crash causing bugs, memory leaks, and performance issues

As always, thank you for all the feedback and enjoy the new build. Remember to invite your friends to use Digsby via Email or Facebook.

Update 1 (12/13/2008 5:45pm): We just pushed a small update fixing an issue that caused a portion of users to get stuck in “Loading Contact List” when logging into AIM or ICQ.

Update 2 (12/13/2008 10:45pm): We just pushed another small update with a complete fix for the AIM/ICQ issue. Thank you to the alpha testers who helped us test this fix on a Saturday

Build 43 - Private Alpha Release (Gmail)

2008-12-31T10:02:00.001-08:00

We just pushed an update to alpha testers (Build 43, r19564 r19586) which introduces many new bug fixes and enhancements along with a few critical fixes. As always, you can read the entire list of new features, bug fixes, and enhancements on our Change Log. Notable changes include:

Added a fallback authentication method to Gmail in case the primary authentication method fails
Implemented a new version of TokBox for audio/video chat
Fixed a major memory leak that affected a small portion of users
Fixed two crash causing bugs
Fixed a bug that caused Digsby to not show on startup even though the process will launch

As always, thank you for all the feedback and enjoy the new build. Remember to invite your friends to use Digsby via Email or Facebook.

Update (12/12/2008 5:35pm): Pushed a fixed to a crash causing bug we introduced in preparation for pushing the Gmail fix to all users!

Build 42 - ICQ Protocol Fix

2008-12-31T10:01:00.000-08:00

ICQ deprecated an older version of their client earlier today and Digsby users were not able to get presence info for their buddies. An update was just pushed to all users (r19460) and alpha testers (r19442) fixing the issue.

Keeping Digsby Free and Ad-Free

2008-12-31T10:00:00.002-08:00

It has been an amazing eight months since we first released Digsby into public beta testing. We have now released 41 builds and Digsby keeps getting better. We’ve gotten great feedback from our users and incredible reviews everywhere from LifeHacker to the Wall Street Journal.

We spend a lot of time talking about the product on this blog and almost no time talking about the company. So, here is a little info about us. We are a startup. We are a team of RIT graduates based in Rochester, NY. We hated the inefficiency of managing multiple IM, email, and social network accounts…. so we created Digsby!

People often ask us how we plan to make money since Digsby is free. Since our public beta launch, we have focused completely on fixing bugs, adding features, and improving performance. However, at the end of the day we do need to keep the lights on so we can keep making Digsby even better! With that in mind, we’d like to share two revenue models that we are currently testing. We are posting this info so everyone understands how each one works, how it affects (or doesn’t affect) you, and how you can opt-out of anything you don’t want to participate in.

Installer

We’re currently testing a new installer that shows you offers during the installation process for other products such as the Yahoo Toolbar and a desktop weather application. The reason we are testing this revenue model is because we believe it is better to show you ads once during the installation process than to plaster banner ads all over the product like other IM clients have done (ie: AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ). We want to do our best to keep Digsby free and ad-free and this is one way we are able to do so.

This is different from our previous installer so it’s important to clarify exactly how this works. All the offers shown to you during installation are 100% optional. You don’t have to install any of the products advertised in the installer and none of them will be downloaded or installed to your computer if you choose not to install them.

This is not a unique revenue model and many other products do this including Java, DivX, CCleaner, Trillian, etc. All the mainstream IM clients also offer the option to install their toolbar just like we offer the Yahoo Toolbar.

We’ve tried to make the offers as clear as possible to make sure people don’t accidentally install something they don’t want. You are clearly given an “Accept” and a “Decline” button. It is not a “Next” button with an obscure pre-selected checkbox somewhere on the screen. The installer also has a list on the left-hand side of all the products you have chosen to install and clearly shows what is being installed at the end of the process.

The installer we are using, InstallIQ, is TRUSTe certified and in order for them to maintain that certification all offers are virus scanned before they are added to the list of products being advertised. There is also a link to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy of each product being offered along with clear instructions on how to uninstall it later.

Research Module

There are numerous research projects that require a massive amount of computing power to complete. One option is to run these on a supercomputer but there are very few of these in the world and renting time on them is very expensive. Another option is to break the problem up into many little pieces so each of the little pieces can run in parallel on thousands or even hundreds of thousands of regular computers. This is called Grid Computing.

A few examples of popular grid computing projects are: Help Conquer Cancer, Discovering Dengue Drugs, FightAIDS@Home, and The Clean Energy Project. Besides these non-profit projects, there are many commercial applications for grid computing such as pharmaceutical drug discovery, economic forecasting, and seismic analysis.

Now that you have an understanding of grid computing, let’s go over how this fits into Digsby. We are testing a revenue model that conducts research similar to the projects mentioned above while your computer is idle. Unlike the installer revenue model above, which is commonly seen in many products, this is much more unique so we’d like to clarify what it does and how it works.

The module turns on after your computer has been completely idle for 5 minutes (no mouse or keyboard movement). It then turns off the instant you move your mouse or the press a key on the keyboard. We did this so it would have absolutely no effect on your computer’s performance and only uses processing power while your computer is not being used. It also runs as a “low priority” process so if any application on your computer asks for CPU power it will always get it before the research module gets it. On laptops, it will use a much smaller portion of your CPUs overall processing power than it will on desktops. It will also never turn on if your laptop is running on battery power.

So what exactly does it do? It downloads a very small chunk of data and runs it through a mathematical algorithm to get an end result. It then reports the result back and gets another chunk of data. The process repeats on thousands of computers until the computation problem is solved. The data it gets is kept in RAM while it is being processed so the module does not access your hard drive at any point. It does not store any data on your computer and it does not access anything at all that identifies you personally.

The idea is to make this both a revenue model and a feature! Some of the research Digsby conducts may be for non-profit projects like the ones mentioned above and some may be for paid projects, which will help us keep Digsby completely free. So, using this module keeps Digsby free and contributes to research projects that will make the world a better place.

Lastly, we have made this module 100% optional. You can disable it in the main menu by going to “Help > Support Digsby” and disabling the “Help Digsby Conduct Research” option. We linked to this blog post in the FAQ section of our website and we’ll be adding more info explaining this feature into Digsby itself, as well as, more extensive options like the ability to set how much of your CPU to use.

Conclusion

In starting to test these two revenue models we made one major mistake. This blog post should have gone up two weeks ago when we first started testing them instead of right now. We have been a user-focused company from the day we launched Digsby. We pride ourselves with the level of customer support we offer and our development process is guided almost entirely by the feedback and suggestions we get from our users. We want to do our best keep this reputation as we keep pushing harder than ever to make Digsby an even better product. Not announcing this before we started testing it created the misconception that we were trying to hide something when in reality we just didn’t want to make a big announcement like this blog post until we decided to make these things a permanent part of Digsby. It was a PR mistake and we learned our lesson. As a young startup we have many more lessons to learn and we will keep doing our best to provide you with a useful communication tool.

Build 41 - Private Alpha Release

2008-12-31T10:00:00.001-08:00

We just pushed an update to alpha testers (Build 41, r19423 r19427) which introduces many new bug fixes and enhancements. As always, you can read the entire list of new features, bug fixes, and enhancements on our Change Log. Notable changes include:

We’re testing a completely new method of load balancing and authentication. All alpha testers will log in to a new server that is running this new code. We’ll keep a close eye on the server to make sure everything is working properly so we can push this to all servers and users in the near future. If you are not able to log in, please email us your diagnostic log.
Fixed a bug that caused the IM window to fall back to incorrect fonts if the font being used by a theme or in a conversation is not present on your computer

As always, thank you for all the feedback and enjoy the new build. Remember to invite your friends to use Digsby via Email or Facebook.

Update 1 (12/8/2008 5:50pm): We just pushed a small update taking us to r19427. It fixed a bug that prevented a few people from logging in using the new load balancing / authentication mechanism.

Awards Galore!

2008-12-31T09:59:00.000-08:00

LifeHacker

We’re proud to announce that we’ve been named one of LifeHacker’s Best New and Improved Software Products of 2008. The other products to make the list are: Firefox 3, Google Chrome, iPhone 2.0, Google Android, iPhone JailBreak, Xbox Media Center, Ubuntu Linux, and Gmail.

It’s humbling to be listed with these other amazing products. This award belongs to you as much as it belongs to us. Thank you for helping guide our development process with all your feedback and suggestions.

Crunchies

Nominations for the 2008 “Crunchies” are still open. The Crunchies is an award ceremony organized by TechCrunch, GigaOm, and VentureBeat to honor the best startups of 2008. You are allowed to vote once per day between now and December 10th. Please show your support by nominating us for any (or all) of the following categories:

Mashable Open Web Awards

Thanks to all your votes, we made it to the final round of the Mashable Open Web Awards! We need your help in this final round so we can bring home the award for Best Social Networking Application! You can vote once per day using the widget below.

New URL for Blog RSS Feed

2008-10-24T20:17:00.000-07:00

We moved our blog’s RSS feed over to FeedBurner. If you subscribe to our blog, make sure to update the URL you are pointing to. If you don’t subscribe, be sure to add it to your news reader so you can get updates about upcoming releases. The new URL is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Digsby

Don’t know what RSS is? It stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it lets you read all your favorite blogs and news sites from one place by pulling content from them. That means you don’t need to keep visiting tons of websites to check for new content. Here is a short video that explains RSS in plain English and helps you get started:

Alpha Testers Needed!

2008-10-24T20:15:00.000-07:00

We need your help! As Digsby continues to grow, more and more people depend on it for their communication needs. While we are still a beta product that is very young, our user base has expanded from the hardcore beta testers to average users who require stability.

As we mentioned in a previous blog post, we are making a change in our development process. We are looking for a select group of people to become “alpha testers”. These users will continue to receive 1-2 updates per week while the rest of the user base will receive updates after we confirm that a release is stable and ready to be pushed out to the masses. This will allow us to consistently release a stable product while maintaining our rapid development cycle.

In order to become an alpha tester, you’ll need to install the alpha version of Digsby. Once you’ve installed it, download this file and place it in the Digsby program folder (otherwise the program will update to the current “released” version). You can always delete the file or reinstall Digsby in order to leave the alpha tester group. Keep in mind that with great power comes great responsibility. We are looking for people who will be proactive in reporting any new bugs that we introduce so we can fix these issues before a release is pushed out to the entire user base. Just use “Help > Send Bug Report” right after an issue happens.

Today, we begin testing Build 35 (r18546) which introduces many critical bug fixes and improvements. We will keep a list if changes in the current alpha on our Change Log. Good luck in testing and thank you for your help!

As always, if you experience any bugs please email us at bugs@digsby.com or use “Help > Send Bug Report” in the main menu to submit a diagnostic log. If you have any suggestions, please email us at features@digsby.com.

Build 34 - Stability is Key!

2008-10-11T00:35:00.000-07:00

We just pushed an update (Build 34, r18219) which introduces support for the new Windows Live Mail that some of out users have already been switched over to along with a few critical bug fixes. As always, you can read the entire list of new features, bug fixes, and enhancements on our Change Log. Notable changes include:

Added support for the new Windows Live Mail that some users have been switched over to
Fixed a bug that caused social network accounts to disappear for a small portion of users
Fixed a bug that caused MSN to disconnect and not know about it so the buddy list was still populated and it did not reconnect
Fixed a bug that caused Digsby to get stuck on “Connecting…” for a small portion of users. If you are experiencing this you do need to reinstall using the latest installer on our website

As Digsby continues to grow, more and more people depend on our product for their communication needs. While we are still a beta product that is very young, our user base has expanded from the hardcore beta testers to average users who require stability.

With that in mind, we are going change our development process in the near future - most likely the next release we do. We are going ask people to sign up in order to become “alpha testers”. These users will continue to receive 1-2 updates per week while the rest of the userbase will receive updates after we confirm that a release is stable and ready to be pushed out to the masses. This will allow us to consistently release a stable product while maintaining our rapid development cycle.

As always, thank you for all the feedback and enjoy the new build. If you experience any bugs please email us at bugs@digsby.com or use “Help > Send Bug Report” in the main menu to submit a diagnostic log. If you have any suggestions, please email us at features@digsby.com.

http://blog.digsby.com/

Build 33 - The Need for Speed

2008-10-10T09:23:00.000-07:00

We’re back to a rapid release cycle and excited to have a new build ready for you all. We just pushed an update (Build 33, r18139 r18152) which is focused on performance, general bug fixes, and enhancements. As always, you can read the entire list of new features, bug fixes, and enhancements on our Change Log. Notable changes include:

There are numerous performance optimizations throughout the program, lowering CPU usage and improving responsiveness. We will continue to focus on this over the next few weeks
Fixed three crash causing bugs thanks to the new crash reporter. Keep the crash reports coming so we can fix any that remain
Possible fix for 2 bugs that caused the CPU to spin to 100% and stay there
Attempted to fix a bug that caused some Hotmail to fail at login. We can’t reproduce this with any of our test accounts so please let us know if it didn’t work
Fixed a bug that caused Digsby to get stuck at “Checking for Updates…” if your proxy returned bad data instead of a file manifest
Fixed a bug that caused some incoming IM’s to not show for Yahoo accounts

Our focus right now is on fixing a few remaining critical bugs and crashes. We will take some time in the near future to make file transfers solid, fix remaining ICQ unicode issues, add group chat support, and enhance our microblogging support.

Update (10/7/08 11:00pm): We just pushed a small fix for two more crash causing bugs taking us from r18139 to r18148.

Update (10/8/08 10:55am): We just pushed a small fix for another crash causing bugs taking us from r18148 to r18152.

http://blog.digsby.com/

New release: Build 32 (r17926)

2008-09-25T00:45:00.000-07:00

Improve performance, improve connectivity, fix most of the remaining bugs, and add some new functionality to boot. Major changes in this release include:

* RAM Usage: We optimized from the ground up and fixed memory leaks to lower RAM usage by almost 75%. This has been the number one complaint since our launch and we are proud to introduce this massive improvement.
* Performance: User interface elements draw twice as fast for better performance. We have made changes to the architecture that will improve GUI responsiveness and CPU utilization across the board.
* Connectivity: Every IM protocol automatically tries multiple connection methods and ports to improve the odds of getting through restrictive firewalls and proxy servers.
* LinkedIn: Digsby now supports LinkedIn in addition to the other social networks. Functionality includes a full newsfeed, alerts when new messages arrive, and the ability to set status right from Digsby.
* Bug Fixes: We have fixed hundreds of bugs, making Digsby more stable than ever. There have been almost 3,000 revisions in our codebase since the last release so there are too many fixes to list in our changelog.

http://blog.digsby.com/

Download.

Who is Digsby ?

2008-09-09T03:41:00.000-07:00

Digsby = IM + Email + Social Networks

Instant Messaging

* One combined buddy list for all your AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber, and Facebook Chat Accounts.
* Manage multiple conversations with tabbed conversation windows. You can drag tabs out into their own windows for important conversations.
* Rename contacts with an alias so you don't have to remember buddy names like 'giantsfan123'.
* If one of your friends has more than one IM account you can combine them into a single merged contact to eliminate duplicate buddies.
* Send your friends SMS messages right from the IM window.
* The InfoBox lets you check everyone's status message and profile just by moving your mouse down the list.
* Changing your status has never been easier. just one click right on the buddy list!
* Multitask while you chat. Minimize the IM window and you see popups of new IM's. Best of all, you can reply right from the popup and get back to what you were doing.
* Log conversation history and find the information you need our search-enabled log viewer.
* And so much more.

Email

* Manage your Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM Mail, IMAP, and POP accounts right from digsby.
* Get popup notifications when new email arrives. Clicking a popup takes you right to the message with auto-login into webmail accounts.
* The email InfoBox gives you a snapshot of your unread messages with just one click
* Perform actions such as "Mark as Read" or "Report Spam" right from the email InfoBox.
* Send emails to your friends right from the IM window. The email is sent directly from any account digsby is tracking for you.

Social Networking

* Stay up to date with everything happening on your Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace account (other network support coming soon).
* Receive alerts of events such as new friend requests, messages, group invites, etc.
* The social network InfoBox gives you a real time NewsFeed of what your friends are up to. Everything from new photos, to status updates, to upcoming birthdays is just a click away.
* Set your Facebook and Twitter status right from Digsby.

Personalize

* Customize digsby with application skins to give it a personal look and feel.
* Change the way your conversations look with themes – everything from simple AIM-style windows to 3D conversation bubbles.
* Complete control over the layout of buddies on the buddy list. Change everything from buddy icon size to whether or not to show a snippet of their away message.
* Sort your buddy list how ever you want! You can organize buddies manually, by status, by service, by name or by log size to place those you communicate with most at the top. You can even choose a secondary sorting method.
* Customizable notification system lets you choose what events you want to be alerted about and how.

Other

* Digsby offers complete synchronization between computers and installations. Everything from the skin you chose to your pre-defined status messages follows you from place to place.
* You can place a widget on your blog, website, or social network profile so you can chat with visitors right from digsby.
* Manage multiple simultaneous file transfers from one simple transfer manager.

http://www.digsby.com/
http://blog.digsby.com/

Download Here : Digsby for Windows

Weirdest Bug Ever

2008-09-09T03:28:00.000-07:00

Since our beta launch, we have sifted through thousands of bug reports. There have been some pretty strange ones but this one takes the cake! Every now and then a user will email us saying that explorer.exe is constantly using 6% - 10% CPU whenever Digsby is running and drops back down to 0% as soon as they exit Digsby.

We can profile Digsby’s CPU usage to see if something is stuck in a loop but we had no idea how we could affect explorer’s CPU usage. For those who don’t know, explorer is essentially the taskbar and desktop that you see in Windows.

Yesterday, one of our users hunted down the cause. It only affects Windows Vista 64-bit users (it was fixed for Vista 32-bit users in Service Pack 1) and it is triggered when you disable the cursor shadow! When he first posted the info our forum we could hardly believe it so he made a video to prove it.

What’s the weirdest bug you’ve seen in the applications you use?

Digsby/explorer.exe from Brandon Watkins on Vimeo.

http://blog.digsby.com/

Disgby Instant Messenger

2008-09-09T03:16:00.003-07:00

Digsby

2008-09-09T03:16:00.001-07:00

Digsby: Part 1

2008-09-09T03:15:00.000-07:00

Digsby IM Client Review

2008-09-09T03:13:00.002-07:00

Digsby All in one Email -IM- Social Networking Client

2008-09-09T03:13:00.001-07:00

Instant Messenger + Social Networking + EMail = Digsby

2008-09-09T03:10:00.000-07:00