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.

LifeHacker is holding a poll to determine the best IM client and Digsby is in the race as one of the top five even though we publicly launched just two weeks ago.

The article gives us a great review saying, “Digsby has taken the world by storm… Digsby is converting new users left and right with their simple but appealing formula: IM + Email + Social Networking = Digsby”

Please support us by voting here: http://lifehacker.com/375391/five-best-instant-messengers

I recently got an email from Brandon De Hoyos, the Guide to IM at About.com. They are hosting the “2008 IM Best Awards”, which will deliver top honors to the best instant messaging clients and their developers. About.com is accepting nominations for this honor in the following categories:

• Best Instant Messenger Experience, measuring overall user experience;
• Most Improved Instant Messenger, based on back-to-back client releases;
• Best Mac Instant Messenger, based on overall user experience;
• Best Third-Party IM
• Best IM Feature
• Best IM Developer(s) of the Year.

Winners in each category will be given featured Essentials placement for one year on http://im.about.com, in addition to all the bragging rights
among the IM community. These nominations must be e-mailed to im.guide@about.com for consideration.

Please show your support for Digsby by sending an email to Brandon at im.guide@about.com. Let me know why you love Digsby and which categories you want to nominate us for.

On another note, LifeHacker just published an article asking their readers, what is the best IM client? Check out the article and leave a comment here: http://lifehacker.com/374855/best-instant-messenger.

Thank you for your continued support as we make Digsby even better

We just pushed an update (Build 23, r13703 r13706) that fixes many of the bugs reported since our public beta release! We had quite a busy week, knocking out 27 bugs and enhancements while laying groundwork for a better auto-update system and a more robust bug reporting system, which will both be pushed out as soon as we are done testing them. As always, you can read the entire list of new features, bug fixes, and enhancements on our Change Log. Most notably:

• Brought back the “Show in taskbar” preference for the buddy list - hopefully bug free this time
• Numerous fixes for the “Listening to” feature including showing both title and artist in iTunes now
• Numerous fixes for spell checker errors such as URLs, numbers, and hyphenated words
• More reliable full screen detection on Vista - XP fixes coming soon!

Our focus right now is on the remaining critical bugs and the auto-update system. After that you will see some profound improvements in performance and memory utilization. If you experience any bugs, please email us at bugs@digsby.com.

Lastly, we want to welcome to all our new users! We are glad to have you join us as we continue improving Digsby! Leave a comment to let us know how we are doing.

Update: Pushed a quick fix for a bug we introduced that prevented a few people from opening IM windows.

What a ride this has been! Since going into private beta testing just six weeks ago, we have released 15 new builds which included 35 major changes, 53 enhancements, and 109 bug fixes. Thank you to everyone who participated in the private beta test for the all the feedback and bug reports. We have been working day and night to squash bugs and implement your suggestions and will continue to do so!

Today, we are proud to announce a major milestone for our little egg-shaped friend. We are launching Digsby into public beta testing to make it available for everyone! An invite code is no longer needed and you can show your support by taking a minute to Invite Your Friends.

With today’s announcement, we are introducing several highly requested features. The complete list of changes can be found on our Change Log as always, but most notably we added:

• Twitter Support – this has been the most requested social network by far. Enjoy!
• Audio/Video Chat – we partnered with TokBox to provide A/V support across IM networks. Implementing native A/V support for all the protocols is still on the roadmap and we will add this functionality in the future.
• Spell Check – we added inline spell checking for the English language (us/gb/ca). We will add 50+ other languages very shortly.
• “Listening to…” Status – there is a new option in the status dropdown which sets your status message to the song you are currently listening to in iTunes or Winamp. We will add support for other media players in the future.
• Block Support – you can now block contacts from the right click menu on the buddy list or the dropdown menu at the top-right corner of the IM window.
• Full Screen Preferences – there is a new set of preferences in the “Advanced” tab for what Digsby should do when you are running full screen applications such as games.

We hope you enjoy the new features and if you experience any bugs send us an email at bugs@digsby.com. Moving forward, the top priority right now is optimizing performance and memory usage. Thank you for your support!

Today’s update (r13070) has a fix for one of our most annoying mis-features to date. Quite a few users (and devs) have discovered that if you get a pop-up notification while the contact list is out of sight, you magically get the buddy list back again!

This gets annoying pretty quickly- so here ya go. There are a couple other minor bug fixes and enhancements that you can see over at the complete changelog but the amazing re-appearing buddy list is the primary fix. =)

We’ve gotten reports of people being unable to connect to AIM and ICQ. The official client yields the same results - their servers are down but only for certain accounts. We are having trouble logging into AIM Mail on those same accounts. We will keep you posted here.

Update:

We just pushed a small update for a bug we introduced so the new revision is r13047. AIM servers are still down but we will update you as soon as we know more.

Update 2:

AIM/ICQ servers appear to be back to normal

We just pushed an update (Build 21, r13042 r13047) that fixes a few very critical bugs and introduces numerous enhancements. As always, you can read the entire list of new features, bug fixes, and enhancements on our Change Log. Most notably:

• Added a preference that lets you hide the buddy list from the taskbar - there were a lot of requests for this one! It is always hidden from the taskbar if docked
• Added a preference that lets you change the padding above and below a buddy - the default was changed from 4 to 2 so buddies are closer together
• Added support for legacy SSL connections for Jabber accounts
• Fixed a major bug that caused the diagnostic log size to spiral out of control. We also added a safety net into the logging system to prevent this from happening even if other unknown bugs trigger it in the future
• Attempted to fix a bug which caused Yahoo to disconnect every few minutes for some people - please let us know if this still happens or if it is fixed
• Found and fixed another one of the bugs which causes CPU usage to spike to 100% - finding the rest of these is still a top priority

The bugs list is starting to get shorter so we will begin to focus on performance optimization and a few highly requested features for the next few builds. Please keep the feature suggestions coming by emailing us at features@digsby.com - this way we can look at the volume of requests for each particular feature and prioritize our time.

We just pushed an update (Build 20, r12861) that fixes a few key bugs. As always, you can read the entire list of new features, bug fixes, and enhancements on our Change Log. Most notably:

• We tracked down another one of the causes for high CPU usage and wanted to get it out right away
• Better return from hibernate - we wait 15 seconds before doing updates to let your computer reconnect to the Internet

We just pushed an update (Build 18, r12783) that fixes many bugs. As always, you can read the entire list of new features, bug fixes, and enhancements on our Change Log. Most notably:

• AIM realizes when the connection to the server dies
• Sending and receiving IMs in MSN is much more reliable now
• Digsby now works if your windows username has unicode in it
• Sent IMs show in the IM window right away instead of after the server confirms delivery - you will be notified if delivery fails
• AIM File transfers are more reliable now

If you still experience any of the bugs above please email us at bugs@digsby.com. Our focus for the next build includes:

• File transfer bugs (send some diagnostic logs of failures)
• Remaining CPU spiking bugs
• Revamping the auto-update system to ensure that a partial update (and a broken digsby) can never happen
• Start working on optimizing memory usage and plugging those leaks
• Perhaps a new feature?

PS: We ran out of ideas for catchy blog post titles when announcing new builds. Please leave a comment with some ideas!

Update:

We just found one of the bugs that caused CPU usage to spike to 100% and couldn’t wait to get it out there so we pushed another update (Build 19, r12811). We will do our best to solve the rest of the bugs related to this issue within the next 1-2 builds. Also, if you use Yahoo and have trouble staying connected please submit a diagnostic log. We want to try to knock this one out ASAP.