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

ReadWriteWeb is holding a poll to see what the best IM clients are. This is a follow-up to an article they wrote about IM interoperability, in which they boldly stated:

Digsby is poised to take a serious amount from the market share of the standard clients because of its interoperability not only with IM clients, but also because of the integrated social networks and even email. It makes me wonder if maybe Digsby is poised to be the “Firefox” of instant messaging if the dominating players aren’t careful.

Please show your support by voting for us: ReadWriteWeb Poll

On another note, it has been 2.5 weeks since our last release, which is uncharacteristic of us. As the bug reports began to die off, we have bunkered down to fully optimize our codebase. The next release will bring a few significant improvements including:

• Major reduction in RAM (memory) usage
• Fixes for most of the memory leaks
• A much more responsive user interface
• Ability to connect to IM networks even if your firewall/proxy restricts that port