trying out a new IM client

I've been trying out Digsby for a few days now. It's an IM+social network client that lets you have a central location for all your contacts from (in my case) Yahoo, GTalk, MSN, and imports updates from Twitter/Facebook.

When I first imported my contacts, the contact list was a mess, since everyone was grouped as to how they were in the original IM accounts. But you can mix/merge contacts across networks. I found it especially helpful since some of my friends had multiple accounts even from just within the same network.

The IM and email features are separate. So you have to enable email if you want to get notified mails for those IM accounts. Email notifications are nifty though, since it not only displays the email as they come in (it's a little delayed compared to Gtalk/YM, but you still do get notified soon after it comes in), but it also lets you automatically apply actions to the messages, i.e. mark as read, delete, etc.

One thing that threw me off though, changing the groups in Digsby will change how they are grouped in the original IM accounts. So it looks like the properties aren't copied onto Digsby, but generated directly from the individual IM servers. As far as ease of use, it's pretty straightforward. It would freeze sometimes when I would try to regroup some contacts (mainly impacting the Yahoo contacts), but the issue would disappear after a few hours.

The fact that this is an all-encompassing client has made me drop the other clients completely. I haven't uninstalled them though, since those still have unique features that can only be used there (i.e. my pc to phone acct on yahoo). But if you're looking to streamline messaging, this is definitely something to check out.