Digsby

» see digsby.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the multi-protocol im client was a specifically 2005-2010 category. you had five accounts on five networks because your friends were scattered across msn, icq, yahoo, aim and jabber, and you did not want five tray icons. trillian had invented this space on windows and pidgin ran it on linux. meebo pulled it into the browser. digsby was the last serious windows entry.

digsby launched in march 2008 out of steve shapiro's rit mba project. by the time it went public it already spoke aim, msn, yahoo, icq, google talk, jabber, myspace im and facebook chat in one window. it also aggregated email inboxes and social network notifications, which put it a half step ahead of trillian on features and a half step behind on stability.

i was on msn through this whole window, running the standard windows live messenger client on ttnet broadband. the multi-protocol aggregators were mostly a niche for people who had one foot in the us social graph (aim, myspace) and one foot elsewhere. in turkey we all lived on the same protocol, msn, so a client that unified eight of them solved a problem we did not have.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the monetization scandal ~

in august 2009 digsby got caught bundling its installer with a distributed-computing agent that used idle user cpu for the company's benefit. the trick was buried in an eula nobody read. lifehacker and slickdeals wrote it up. digsby quietly walked the setting back the following week after a wave of users left. it was one of the earlier public examples of freeware treating installed cpu as a revenue stream. mining had not been invented yet or it would have been that.

~ the actual end ~

in april 2011 tagged bought dotsyntax. it was tagged's first acquisition and framed as part aqui-hire, part tech buy. all seven employees moved over. digsby the product went into maintenance mode and stopped getting real updates.

in september 2012 digsby's code was moved to github as open source, which sounds generous but is usually what a corporate owner does right before letting a product die. no one seriously maintained the codebase after that. by april 2013 the shell company that held the digsby assets was gone and the client stopped working against most of the networks it was built to talk to, because msn, yahoo and aim were all being deprecated on the server side anyway.

~ the long tail ~

the client is still downloadable on old freeware archives if you want a windows executable that tries to connect to services that no longer exist. it is a good museum piece. the whole category of desktop multi-protocol im collapsed together in 2013-2014 when the networks it depended on all shut off their xmpp bridges within eighteen months of each other.

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