DEMOfall '09 product spotlight: Digsby

Let's be honest – keeping track of your favorite Web sites has become a real pain.

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Between Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Gmail and a whole slew of instant messaging protocols, the Internet has become a fragmented mess where you must constantly check for updates and shuttle between tabs and windows. Fear not, though, because a little cartoon blob named Digsby is here to help.

Digsby, which is the brainchild of the Rochester, N.Y., company dotSyntax, is essentially a mass aggregator of social networking, e-mail and instant messaging sites. But Digsby goes one step further than most aggregation applications because it actively notifies you every time there is an update to one of your e-mail or social networking accounts.

At DEMO this week, Digsby announced that it has added Twitter to its already considerable arsenal of integrated social networking sites. However, Digsby didn't just incorporate Twitter into its platform but also made some significant changes to the Twitter format in the hopes of making it more accessible to users.

After the DEMO presentation, dotSyntax CEO and founder Steve Shapiro sat down with Network World to discuss how Digsby can make Internet use more efficient and what its designers plan on tackling next.

If you can, try to sum up Digsby in 100 words or less.

Digsby helps you manage your instant message, e-mail and social networking accounts from one easy-to-use desktop application. It helps you save time because you don’t have to keep checking for updates. The key is that it serves more as a notifying application than an aggregator, as it gives you a real-time snapshot of e-mails, tweets, status updates and so forth.

How is Digsby able to integrate all of these IM and social networking sites into one platform?

It's a lot of work. The social networks have published APIs, which is phenomenal from our perspective. For instant messaging, there are multi-protocol IM clients that have been around for a while, so that also helps. We haven't tackled Skype yet; that's supposed to be the toughest one to integrate into an application like Digsby.

When Digsby set out to improve Twitter, what did it identify as the platform's chief strengths and flaws?

The great thing about Twitter is that it's like a giant chat room where you can choose who you want to listen to in that room. It's not like Facebook where it's a closed social network. Instead you interact with the whole online community whether they're your personal friends or not. From a weakness standpoint, a lot of people that join Twitter don't get it because it's not like a lot of social networking sites they've used before. And the other problem is that once you follow more than 50 or so people, that noise just becomes tremendous and hard to keep track of.

To address the issue of people not understanding how Twitter works, we've reframed it more as a chat technology that people have been using for a decade. So when you use Twitter on Digsby, the most recent tweets appear at the bottom with previous tweets at the top of the screen. We thought that making this more like a traditional chat system would make it more accessible for average users.