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:

• Best Overall
• Best New Startup of 2008
• Best App
• Best Technology Innovation Award
• Best Design
• Best Startup CEO (Steve Shapiro)

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.

Update: Mashable voting is now closed.

Yahoo servers for both Mail and Messenger authentication are down.  There are intermittent periods of successful login but most attempts are failing.  We’ll  update this post when they come back online.

Update (7:15pm): It looks like everything is back to normal.

We want to thank everyone for helping us get nominated for the Open Web Awards!  Voting is now live and we need your help to win! You can vote once per day using the widget below.

PS: We’re sorry to keep bugging you all with these competitions.  It’s the end of the year so they are all happening at once.  We’ve had an exciting year since our public beta launch this past March and we greatly appreciate your help in spreading the word about Digsby.

Every day we get crash reports from about 0.1% of our users. While that may not sound like much, we want to make Digsby as reliable as possible. The last few remaining crash causing bugs have been pretty mysterious and even the crash reports are not helping us hunt them down.

Often times something goes wrong but the application does not crash until later so the original cause is not obvious. We created a version of Digsby that records MUCH more diagnostic information as it runs.  It keeps track of its state after every little thing that happens and as soon as it detects something going wrong it will crash. Getting crash reports from this version of Digsby will make the bugs much more apparent and we should be able to fix them right away.

We need your help! If Digsby crashes for you pretty regularly, please follow the instructions below to use this test release.

• Step 1: Read the warnings below!
• Step 2: Download it here: http://update.digsby.com/digsby_debug.zip
• Step 3: Unzip the folder somewhere (ie: your desktop)
• Step 4: Instead of clicking the shortcut you normally click, run Digsby.exe inside the Digsby folder you just unzipped
• Step 5: Click “Help > About” to make sure that you are running dev
• Step 6: If it crashes, please submit a crash report when prompted to do so
  

WARNING 1: This debug version of Digsby will NOT run on Windows Vista. Please only participate if you are running Windows XP 32-bit.

WARNING 2: The conversation themes are disabled. The IM window will look very plain – that is not a bug.

WARNING 3: This version of Digsby will run more slowly than the regular release because of all the diagnostic stuff happening under the hood. Use it until you get Digsby to crash a few times and then feel free to switch back to the regular release if it is running too slowly for you.

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, 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.

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:

MSN login servers are down so some of you will not be able to log in to your Windows Live Messenger account.  We will keep you posted.

Update (12:30pm EST): It looks like service has been restored.

Update (3:50pm EST): Down again. Thanks for the emails and blog comments, everyone

Update (4:05pm EST): Up again, let’s hope they last a bit longer this time.

TradeVibes is a website that aggregates facts and opinions about startups.  They are currently running a contest called “Fever Pitch” and the winner will get a one hour meeting with Ron Conway. Ron is a renowned Silicon Valley entrepreneur and angel investor, having made early investments in companies like Google, Digg, and Twitter among many others. His years of wisdom make his perspective invaluable. We would love to have the opportunity to chat with him for an hour so we can pick his brain for feedback.

We need your help to win Fever Pitch!  The company with the most “Bullish” votes and the least “Bearish” votes at 11:59 PST on August 15th, 2008 wins. To vote, visit the link below and click the green “Bullish” icon in the top right corner. You do need to register for an account and then activate it by clicking the link they email you before you can vote. We really appreciate your support!

http://www.tradevibes.com/company/profile/dotsyntax

On another note, thank you all for the feedback regarding the new build.  All the memory optimizations have surely been welcomed and we are glad to see most people reporting that memory usage is down by over 50%. We are working hard to fix the bugs and crashes you have reported so we can release it to everyone. If you are interested in helping us test it, there are instructions here: http://blog.digsby.com/archives/47

After getting everyone used to a rapid cycle with new builds every 2-7 days since our beta launch, it has been 6 weeks since we pushed the last update. WTF? Such a slow development cycle is unlike us so we wanted to give you a quick update on what’s going on. I’m sure you are all eager for the new build, as we are! The upcoming release is taking longer to wrap up because it is a pretty major release. Since our public beta launch on March 20th, the #1 complaint we have heard about Digsby is that it uses too much RAM. Our explanation has always been that we released the beta without optimizing and that we would take some time to do it once the major bugs were fixed.

When the last build was pushed we decided that it was time to buckle down and get to work on the optimizations we’ve been promising! The goal was to significantly lowering RAM usage and also to improve the responsiveness of the GUI. Many people have reported that Digsby is taking 70MB – 110MB during normal use. If you leave Digsby running for several days without restarting, the memory leaks caused RAM usage to climb to 150MB+ on some systems. That is completely unacceptable by our standards!

This has been a massive undertaking and we finally have the new version built. We are testing it internally. Because this was such a major change in architecture we introduced some new bugs. We are pushing as fast as we can to fix these so we can get it out to you guys. We don’t have an exact ETA since there is a lot of uncertainty in guessing how long it will take to fix a particular bug and we are still finding new ones. However, rest assured that we are working as hard as we can to finish as quickly as possible!

RAM and performance are not the only things we have been working on. This build also introduces a ton of bug fixes and enhancements. If you have been experiencing a bug, chances are that the upcoming build will fix it. We closed over 100 tickets in our project management system since the last build! As always, we will list all the changes in the Change Log when the update goes live. For those of you who are new to Digsby, it will update the next time you launch it after an update goes live. You don’t need to download or run anything.

On another note, we added a Getting Started guide and a section for FAQ and Common Issues to the documentation wiki to help new users get started. We want to thank you for all your support so far. We will keep pushing to make Digsby even better and greatly appreciate all your feedback and words of encouragement!

The AIM login servers are down. This is system wide and you will not be able to log in with AIM 5.9, AIM in Gmail, Digsby, or other third party IM clients. AIM 6+ connects to a different set of servers and connectivity seems to be more reliable if you need a temporary solution. We will post an update here once service is restored.

Update: It looks like the AIM servers are back online.

Update 2: AIM servers are down again as of June 19th, 11:00am EST

Update 3: It looks like AIM servers are back online as of June 19th, 11:20am EST