A long time ago, in an apartment far, far away… I was a gaming geek, and other gaming geeks with whom I chatted on IRC were talking about a new instant messaging tool called ICQ. It was kinda like the instant messaging that AOL had, but you didn’t have to be an AOL user. I wish I still had my old ICQ#, it was low, and that made me leet… sadly, I forgot the password, had the account set up with an email address I didn’t have access to, and after much pleading with the ICQ guys I gave up and got a new account. But I barely use ICQ at all anymore. Over the years, AOL made their IM client available to everyone, Yahoo put one out, and so did Microsoft. There are more, like Google Talk, X-fire, and most social networking sites have some sort of integrated chat, but I haven’t signed up for most of them. The real problem was having all that crap installed on your PC. For years each network was completely separate. And even now, only a couple of them have linked up to share. That was why when a friend showed me Trillian, I was extremely excited.
Just think! All my instant messaging clients wrapped up in one application where I could manage them all!
Trillian has served me well over the years, but a while back they simply stopped going forward. The developers were pouring all their time into Astra (I’m in the beta), their next multi-IM client, but even it is going forward slowly. It also doesn’t seem to be expanding on the features of the old program very much. I’m in the beta, and I’ve been using it… its basically the same thing with a slightly different look and feel. In fact, really, the only thing that Astra has is a web version that promised to have the same contact and configuration info as your desktop client does so you can get on your IMs from anywhere you can open a browser to their site.
A couple months ago, someone pointed me at Digsby. I poured through the feature list and got very excited again. They promised to integrate with MySpace and Facebook and others, they also promised to allow me to manage my email accounts (like hotmail and yahoo) without having to open the webpage if I didn’t want to. And it delivered… with one tiny flaw. See, they had this feature that allowed you to alias and merge multiple IM accounts for the same person under one entry, so now I wouldn’t see the same person four times, I’d see them once with four options for chatting. The flaw was that after moving all my contacts around, when I closed and then re-opened Digsby, all my contacts were gone.
So, I trudged back to Trillian after one glorious day of Digsby. But now, a few months later, I decided to check up on ol’ Digsby and it turns out they claim to have fixed many of the bugs, including the one I ran into. I fired up Digsby and it auto-updated to the latest version, and blam! all my contacts! In fact, all my contacts in the way I had grouped them prior to them vanishing!
It looks like I’m giving Digsby a second chance. I’m still not uninstalling Trillian/Astra, just in case I need to recover my contacts again, but maybe this time ol’ Digsby will stick. I hope it does, because I dig all the extra feature, none of which look like they are going to make Astra any time soon.