Digsby

More than just an instant-messaging tool, Digsby can also be used to access emails and updates from social-networking sites. The program combines your contact lists from Microsoft, Yahoo, ICQ, Jabber, AIM and Google Talk, providing easy access to all your friends in one handy list. Because IM services often have email accounts associated with them, it makes sense that Digsby provides email checking along with other basic actions, such as message deletion and marking as read. It is even possible to send emails from the instant-messaging window, although this means missing out on a few formatting options. Status updates and newsfeeds from social-networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and MySpace are another helpful addition.

The sheer range of features packed onto a single application could all too easily lead to a complicated program, but this is not the case with Digsby. Everything remains intuitive and easy to use, while support for skins means that customisation is simple. The program can be tailored to provide different visual alerts for events in separate accounts and, while it would be nice to have a few more options to change the way in which the program works, there is plenty here to get started with.

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