@AC Doctor
I am glad that I ditched Trillian – what a buggy piece of crap that was.

however, is it at all concerning to have a propriety application storing/accessing contact information? i didn't see any ads when using it. what is the monetary motivation for dotSyntax, LLC? How are they paying for their bandwidth/server space?

concerning the points of discussion:
@василий:
I'm enjoying the essentially WIMP-less window management of "awesome" (a fork of dwm, similar to wmii,ion). When I'm hacking away in vim on desktop tag 1 and waiting for my willfully computer-ignorant friend to contact me via AOL IM, a message i will receive as a new tab in pidgin on tag 2, a digsby style pop up would be ideal. instead, mpd is pumping out some awful poorly recorded folk-punk that masks the audio notification, and i miss the message. conversely, i have trayer 'stuck' to all tags, and checkgmail running. it presents a popup when i receive new mail. i respond timely.
There are events with a significance greater than the current work flow. pop-up notification is currently one of the best paradigms for realizing this.(right?)

@василий,Artem:
"do one thing and do it well" might be too much of a soundbite to do any philosophy justice. And anyway, it seems like a mistake to say digsby isn't doing a lot. its motto is a three term algebraic statement! Though the unix philosophy appears broke in some places ( http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=424451 ), i'd think social aggregation is a good place to see unix philosophy shine.
However, i have no idea what an ideal unix implementation would look like? would i have a service for each IM network, or only for everying taken care of with libpurple? what about webmail and twitter/myspace/facebook/lastfm/flickr/whatever integration. a service for each? how do they communicate? do i pipe to some reader and connect to the service on a socket for input?
It'd definitely be quite cool to do something with netcat like "echo -n $network_type\n$buddy:$message\nclose|nc $imservice" There be tremendous flexibility!
what if i want to talk or even see (video chat) my contacts?

but really something is wrong in every approach i've encountered. if i type something, look at a file, play a song, or etc, a truly integrated system would always have contextual options to email,IM,(micro)blog, or, i don't know, socialize in some way. not via plugin, not via a bloated do-it-all program.

#2 I am a WindowsXP user and these two clients were both originally developed on different platforms. It is expected that they both fail more on non-native platforms (also valid statement when Digsby gets ported to Unix/Linux).

#3 This definitely is personal preference. My co-workers have separate accounts, but they are the same person so I would want to group them under one name.

#10 In #2, I've only compare the IM aspect of Digsby to Pidgen & Trillian (saying that it crashes less [on Windows]). I used to keep Trillian's buddies.xml in sync across my multiple machines but it's a pain to setup automatic syncing (at least if you are on Windows – maybe I should rethink the windowing strategy like you said). With Digsby, the sync just works (though not as fast as Artem likes it to).

I remember seeing Einstein's quote on Thaya's website about fools and complexity; interestingly enough, that quote is gone now

Thank you for visiting my site and noticing these details! I've removed the quote as it doesn't have much to do with the whole goal of my blog (anymore). I want to focus more on building a community that does not hold back on giving inputs (from fear of criticism or what not). My goal is to start getting debates as intense as this one on my blog.

#8 If you are happy with the way WindowsXP manages your windows, I accept the usability of popups in your case. (perhaps you want to rethink the whole windowing strategy in your case)

In any case, I do think digsby does too many things, and I can't tell you exactly how many unnecessary things it does, since I posses no source code.

@Thaya
#2 if Pidgin crashes for you, you can backtrace the crash and debug it. If you don't want to "waste" time on this task, send the backtrace to developers. AFAIK, Pidgin is mainly developed for Unix like operating systems and only then ported to Windows, which I assume you guys are users of. This can lead to problems that are uninteresting to main developers and hence it's the responsibility of Windows Users to step up and help.

#3 "They keep work & play separate" Isn't this exactly why you don't want to merge work and home contacts? thanks for proving my point.

#10 If digsby isn't an "Instant Message", why do you compare it to Trillian and Pidgin? I also don't see why people can't for example run pidgin on all of their boxes and simply keep ~/.libpurple in sync. So much for inventing pointless protocols.

I remember seeing Einstein's quote on Thaya's website about fools and complexity; interestingly enough, that quote is gone now

In any case, most of these arguments boil down to your values and priorities. To each his own.

Maybe I can also add Skype support into that list of new features.

To me, Plurk is a lot more like IM than Twitter is. Every Plurk I post ends up becoming a chat with multiple readers.

RSS is a good feature for me, but definitely not necessary.

@василий

You sound really frustrated with Digsby. Here are some follow-up comments I have.

#2 Pidgen crashes for me more than Trillian does. Trillian crashes for me more than Digsby does. Enough said.

#3 Many people at my work use different accounts depending on where they are: work or home. They keep work & play separate that way and I know to not IM them work-related stuff when they are on their "home" account.

#4 In addition to using this feature to keep in touch with friends that are non-IM users, I love how I DO NOT have to go to every one of my hundreds of friends' profile to manually add each one of their IM.

#5 I believe this is best used for small sites that sell products. They can use this feature to provide live customer support.

#10 Digsby is not an Instant Message. They do advertise "IM + Email + Social Networks" as the main feature of Digsby though. If you are able to be contacted "EVERYWHERE" like I am, then you want a single point of communication. I look to Digsby more of a communication portal than an IM client. With Digsby, my Email/IM/Twitter response time is almost instantaneous. A difference that you need to keep readers on your blog.

василий, thanks for the comments. I can see that you're disgruntled and I think overly negative about Digsby but everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I know you're from planetmysql, so most likely you're a developer and developers are hard folk to please. Most other people (me and Thaya included, though we're developers ourselves) do enjoy the things you don't seem to.

#1 has nothing to do with the protocols. The grouping and ordering get lost with Pidgin, Trillian, etc. because they maintain no state of such grouping or ordering, or program settings anywhere but locally. Digsby solves that problem. Note that I didn't talk here about, say, logging into AIM from 2 places and adding a person into one and not seeing changes on the other.

#2 yeah, Digsby isn't open source, I'll agree with you that it's a minus. However, compared to Trillian, which is not only not open source, but also has a paid version, but barely any updates, Digsby takes the prize. Pidgin has been in development for a really long time too but still looks like crap (I foresee that looks don't matter much to you though).

#3 I have plenty examples. Especially if you consider #4.

#4 Why? Because you can talk to all your friends on facebook, regardless of them having an IM account. Not everyone uses IM but most everyone logs into facebook once in a while. The number of people I can "IM reach" has increased significantly. You do remember we're talking about an IM program, that has a purpose of connecting people, right?

#5 It's a matter of preference. Sure email is fine too, but if I'm clearly online, a quick 2-way chat could be easier and faster. It's an additional option and I believe having choice is good.

#7 (is actually #8) I don't consider myself an attention whore either but if someone happens to like the song I'm listening to, it can spring up a conversation. Again, I certainly don't see any harm in having the option.

#8 (is actually #7) I like having my windows open full screen so a popup (very configurable at that) is handy. If you don't like them, you can turn them off.

#9 Skins are nothing new indeed, but I wanted to point out how customizable they are in Digsby. Small things potentially but they add to the good experience. I can actually think of more than 10 great features, so 10 was shortening the list.

#10 You're right, it's not, yet it's a nice option. Trillian, Google Talk, AIM, MSN alread do it (partially), why would Digsby lack?

The UNIX philosophy is great and works really well in console apps, scripts, and such. At the same time, I don't think Digsby does too many things. I'm not going to comment on this philosophy more besides saying that I appreciate it where it's appropriate.

Most importantly, I think arguments like this are great. The more arguments are brought up, and the more bugs are fixed, features reworked and added, the better. I know that Digsby developers have seen this post and already provided valuable feedback. So keep up the complaints and praises, they all benefit the cause.