We moved the blog commenting system over to Disqus to provide a richer user experience.   Major differences you will see are:

• You can now reply to comments and the replies are threaded making them more like a conversation
• You can ‘like’ comments
• You can comment with your Facebook, Twitter, OpenID, Yahoo, or Disqus account to tie them to your real identity
• All the comments you make on blogs that use Disqus are available in one central place
• Easily post your comment back to Facebook or Twitter to share it with friends

With over 200 submissions and hundreds of fan votes, the Digsby Twitter Background contest has ended and we are excited to announce the winners!  Before we do though, we just want to say how amazed we are by the talent of our fans.  It was a very difficult decision.  There were some incredible submissions so we’re highlighting the top 10 on our Spread the Word page along with buttons and banners that you can place on your blog or website to promote Digsby.

Without further ado, here are the winners of the Digsby Twitter Background Contest:

1st place (by @letusdare2think)

2nd place (by @wemps)

3rd place (by @Jerlyn)

The winners will receive Amazon Gift Cards, Digsby T-Shirts and Digsby USB Drives!  We can’t thank you enough for your participation and hard work.  Be sure to keep a look out for more fantastic contests and check out all 10 top picks on the Digsby Spread the Word page!

RIT recently opened its brand new Center for Student Innovation, a 24/7 facility where students can come together to turn ideas into innovative products and solutions.

Digsby started as a class project at RIT.  It was taken from idea to reality by a team of RIT grads so our CEO was asked to give the keynote address at the grand opening.

The video below offers some good advice for college students:

One of the great things about being in an incubator is that we get to work right next door to amazing start-ups.  One of those start-ups happens to be Dumbwaiter Design, a passionate design firm with some serious talent.  They’ve made an incredible 90-second demo video for our homepage that shows off everything Digsby has to offer!

Telling your friends about Digsby is now even easier – you can just show them!  If you like the video, give it a 5-star rating and take a few moments to share it with your friends on Facebook and Twitter.

Speaking of demos…. We will be at the DEMOfall 2009 on Tuesday unveiling a brand new Twitter implementation in Digsby that is unlike any other Twitter client you’ve seen.  If you happen to be attending DEMO, stop by station #48 and say hello.  You can also watch the entire conference live tomorrow at http://www.demo.com.

We want extend a big thank you to Dumbwaiter Design for the hard work they put into this video.  We highly recommend you check them out!

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

We recently sponsored a LAN party hosted by the RIT Electronic Gaming Society. Here are a few pictures from the event and you can see the entire gallery here.

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.

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?

The community run website at digsbies.org is holding a poll asking what social network protocols we should add next and we thought we would promote the poll a bit to get some insight:

http://digsbies.org/site/node/189

On another note, we have a new build right around the corner with a number of bug fixes including docking fixes and HTTP proxy fixes that are causing some people’s email accounts to not work properly. We also have something special planned for this build

The community run website at digsbies.org is holding a poll asking what IM protocol we should have next and we thought we would promote the poll a bit to get some insight:

http://digsbies.org/site/node/137

On another note, we have a new build coming early next week with the Twitter enhancements you have been asking for, a more solid auto-update system, and numerous bug fixes.