We’re excited to announce that Digsby has passed a major milestone. Over 1 million people now use Digsby to manage over 3 million IM, email, and social network accounts!  We’ve seen tremendous growth since our launch and Digsby has quickly become a leader in the IM market.

It’s all thanks to you, our passionate users! We could not have passed this milestone without you. You’ve been our marketing team from day one and you continue to spread the word about Digsby. To thank you for all your effort and to encourage you to keep spreading the word, we are announcing the Digsby Affiliate Program.

A first in the IM industry, the program will pay you up to $1.00 for every new Digsby user you bring. Affiliates can promote Digsby by placing banners or buttons on their blog or website, or by simply inviting their friends with their affiliate link. Thank you again for all your support. We’ll keep pushing to make Digsby even better and greatly appreciate your help in spreading the word.

To learn learn more about the affiliate program and to sign up, visit:

http://www.digsby.com/affiliate/

We are having database issues that are causing some people to get an “Authentication Error” on login.  We’re working to fix the problem right now.

While we are working on the issue, Digsby may start in “Local Mode” and load your preferences from the hard drive. We will post an update here when the issue is resolved.

Update (7/7/09 9:45am): Everything is back to normal. Sorry for the temporary inconvenience.

We wanted to spread the word about the Summer of Social Good, which is a charity event that the good folks over at Mashable are organizing.

The Summer of Social Good is the first large scale online charitable campaign to raise funds strictly online through the power of Social Media and the Internet. The goal is to use the power of “Social Influence” via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Blogs and other online media to raise an unprecedented amount for The Humane Society, LIVESTRONG, Oxfam America and WWF from June 1st until August 28th, 2009.

Here at Digsby, we’ve always been huge fans of social media and its emerging role in our day-to-day lives. By donating to the Summer of Social Good you can continue to show the positive change that social media has brought to the world.

For more information and to donate, please visit:

http://summerofsocialgood.com/

Digsby is on the front cover of the June issue of Maximum PC… and the largest icon of them all 

Update: Time Warner cancels plans for tiered Internet pricing!  WIN!  More details here.

As a Rochester company, we are in tune with a lot of what goes on in our hometown.  We don’t usually meddle in local issues but this is a topic we are all passionate about so we wanted share it with all of you.

Time Warner Cable announced that it would be switching from a  flat monthly rate for Internet access to tiered pricing that is based on consumption.  The $29.99 plan will be capped at 10GB of bandwidth and you will be charged $1/GB for any usage beyond that.  If you want your good ‘ole unlimited bandwidth Internet access you will end up paying as much as $150 per month!

So how much is 10GB anyway?  They make it sound like they are only doing this to stop all those software-pirating BitTorrent users.  Here is a legitimate use case. If you purchase the high-def version of Quantum of Solace on iTunes, that is a 3.54GB download.  Buy three movies in one month and you hit the 10GB limit.

Besides the above use case, there are innovative new products launching every day that require large amounts of bandwidth.  Services like streaming video on Netflix or Hulu, video conferencing, and gaming are all going to suffer.  Innovation in general will suffer because you are limited in the kinds of applications you are able to create.

We are not alone! New York Congressman Eric Massa announced the Massa Broadband Internet Fairness Act, which would prohibit unfair tiered price structures and countless people are voicing their opinions in various ways.

So what can you do? Share your thoughts in the comments section. Having a discussion about the issue is how you create awareness.

If you are a local Rochesterian, there will be protest this Saturday that you can attend to make your voice heard! Here are the event details:

• Facebook Event Info
  
• Date: Saturday, April 18, 2009
• Time: 11:00am – 5:00pm
• Location: Time Warner Cable Store
• Address: 71 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY

A large chunk of the neighborhood lost power including our facility.  The backup lasted for the last 20 minutes but the electric company has not resolved the issue in time and our network is currently down.  This will be resolved as soon as possible.

On a brighter note, a release that goes live next week will include “local mode” functionality we have been working on so if this happens again, your use of Digsby will not be interrupted.  Digsby will load cached preferences and account info from your hard drive and then resynchronize when it is able to establish a connection to our servers.

Update (12:30pm EST): Two of the three power sources coming into the facility have been restored so the servers are back online.  However, until power is fully restored we may not be out of the woods yet.  We’ll keep you posted.

Update 2 (2:30pm EST): Everything is still online and all power has been restored to the building so we expect things to remain stable.  This issue actually pointed out a few issues with “local mode” since Alpha users already had the functionality.  We will patch it up and push another Alpha release with the fixes next week.  The next public release should also be sometime next week.

The Rochester Twestival is today at 5pm.  We hope to see you there!  Twestivals are being hosted in over 175 cities worldwide today to bring Twitter users together and raise money for charity:water, a nonprofit organization that helps bring clean water to people in developing nations.

You can learn more Rochester Twestival here.

We are having server-side issues that brought down the service.  We are working on the problem now and will be back up shortly.  If you want to be notified when we come back online, send an email to bugs@digsby.com.

After a year of almost perfect uptime, this is the second outage in the last week.  This is completely unacceptable and we will make sure this does not become a regular occurrence!

Update 1 (2:00pm 2/9/2009): We are working to restore the databases now so we can bring the servers back online.  Part of the team is meeting right now to discuss the implementation of “local mode” so the client is not dependent on servers.

Update 2 (3:30pm EST 2/9/2009): We have the primary database online and are synchronizing across nodes.  We hope to be back online within about an hour.

Update 3 (4:30pm EST 2/9/2009): The synchronization is about 50% done so it looke like it may be another hour.  We’ll post an update here as soon as we are online.

Update 4 (6:30pm EST 2/9/2009): We’re back!

We are having electricity issues that brought down the servers.  The issue is being worked on and we’ll be back online ASAP.

Update 1 (8:00am 2/2/2009): Everything is back online and just in time! An article about Digsby just made the front page of Digg.  LifeHacker featured us as one of the top five system tray applications.  Check out the article and vote for us!

Update 2 (9:00am 2/2/2009): Power is down again for the building and traffic lights in the immediate area. The power company has been notified and they are working to fix the issue as quickly as possible.  The power backup was able to keep things online for a periood of time but it couldn’t handle such a long outage.

Update 3  (10:30am 2/2/2009): Everything is back online and hopefully for good this time.  We’ll put up  a blog post soon explaining what happened and what will be done to prevent it from ever happening again. We apologize for the short downtime everyone experienced.