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.

A number of users are having trouble connecting to Digsby right now.  We are working on the issue and will have this resolve as quickly as possible.  We’ll post an update here when it is fixed.

Update 1: Everything is back online.   We are still digesting what happened and will post an update here with an explanation of what went wrong and what we are doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Update 2: We wanted to apologize again for the short outage we had on Friday.  Below is a semi-technical explanation of what happened. There was a network disruption, which caused a mass reconnect of all logged in users.  This happens sometimes and we usually handle it without any issues.  However, this time it ended up overloading the servers, causing them to crash.  This resulted another mass reconnect and another crash.  It took a few times for things to stabilize.  This happened because several things went wrong at the same time. The new authentication system we introduced in Build 41 didn’t run properly on multiple processors.  This cut the amount of logins each sever can handle to be 1/4 of actual capacity.  As a result, a queue began to build up of people who had connected but were waiting to authenticate.  This queue started to drain the RAM each server had, causing the crash.  A variety of things are being done to prevent this in the future.  We are fixing the authentication system so a mass reconnect does not slow things down.  We are adding RAM to add a little buffer room so if this does happen again, it doesn’t result in a crash. Lastly, we are optimizing how clients reconnect when they lose the connection to our servers.

Wakoopa, a social network centered around what software people use, has named Digsby the Best New App of 2008. It has been an exciting year for us and we want to thank all our users for the support and feedback you have given us. We will keep pushing to make Digsby even better in 2009!  Best wishes in the new year from the entire Digsby team.

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.

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.