We have some very exciting and exclusive news about Digsby, the popular multi-protocol IM client is about to announce a major update later today to the Digsby client, this update will include several enhancements and includes the culmination of three months of development efforts.

The new features that will be rolled out in this new version includes several exciting changes including several performance enhancements and CPU usage reduction by about 50%.

In addition to this you can also lookup and search your buddies in your buddy list as well as on the web.

Another new feature is the ability to set invisible status for GTalk, which is not yet available in the basic GTalk client.

Disgby New Features Overview

• Performance: Performance optimization from the ground up, reducing overall CPU usage by about 50%
• Buddy List Search: Press Ctrl+F to easily search your buddy list or the web
• Emoticons: Added four new emoticon packs to choose from
• File Transfers: Improved the reliability of AIM, ICQ, and MSN file transfers
• Conversations: Added an option for new IM windows to start hidden and blink the tray icon instead of popping up a window
• New Infobox: The infobox now uses the same user interface control as the IM window (WebKit), making it much faster and more versatile
• MySpace: Added support for setting status on MySpace
• Google Talk: Added support for the Invisible status on Gtalk
• And More: Over 100 other bug fixes and enhancements!

Here are some exclusive screen shots of the new application.

More screenshots coming soon.

What do you think of the updates that will be made available later today? You can head over to the Digsby Blog to catch up the announcement later today.

Download Digsby

AOL has release the first beta version of AIM the popular instant messenger tool for Mac. This is after the recently released a version of AIM for iPhones.

AIM Beta for Mac Features

• AIM Experience: Users can customize their AIM for Mac experience with AIM Expressions – Change your AIM sounds, wallpaper, emoticon set or Buddy Icon.
• Favorite AIM Features: AIM File Transfer, Tabbed IM conversations, friendly names, AIM Groups, AIM Blast groups are supported.
• Easy Access to Mail: With a single click, you can view your mail in AOL or AIM webmail.
• Speed: Download, install and launch AIM for Mac in seconds.

If you are a Mac user and have been waiting for AIM to be released, here is your chance. Download and have fun chatting with your friends.

AIM for Mac Beta

I have been using Digsby for last couple of days and must say that I am quite impressed by it. Not only does it allow me to login to multi IM networks such as Yahoo, MSN, AIM, GTalk and Jabber but also has a host of other features such as checking mails from Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail and AOL in addition to checking mails from POP accounts.

Well I also use it for more of twittering now and a little bit for Facebook. You can always follow me on twitter.

Read this post by Karthik to know more as to why should start using Digsby (which actually inspired me to start using it in the first place).

If you’re on a Mac, you probably wish that there was an application that you could use to chat with all of your online buddies at the same time! There are a couple of applications out there, but mostly for Windows. There is also a web site that you can use called Meebo, which lets you chat with buddies from AOL, Yahoo, Google Talk, and MSN for free without having to download or install any software.

Still, if you’re a Mac OS X user and you would prefer a desktop application for your chatting purposes, you can check out an open-source app called Adium. Adium has a really cool looking interface and has a lot of nice features.

All of your friends from all services show up in one window with little icons on the right to show from which service the user is from.

The chat window is tabbed so you don’t have to clutter your desktop with 20 chat windows all over the place! The icons and the OS X interface looks great and really make the application worthwhile just because of it’s looks! Each user is color-coded and you can change the colors or the entire skin or theme if you like.

Adium supports a bunch of different services, including the following:

• AOL Instant Messenger (Including ICQ and .Mac)
• Jabber (Including Google Talk and LiveJournal)
• MSN Messenger
• Yahoo! Messenger (Including Yahoo! Japan)
• Bonjour (Compatible with iChat)
• MySpace IM
• Gadu-Gadu
• Novell Groupwise
• QQ
• Lotus Sametime

Here are a couple of the notable features of Adium which make it an excellent choice for any Mac users looking for a unified chat application:

• OTR Encryption
• Tabbed Messaging
• File Transfer
• Webkit Message Display

It also supports about 20+ languages. Overall, it’s a cool app with great looks and it’s completely free! Enjoy!

GTalk is slowly inching towards becoming a popular IM client and is almost the preferred means of communicating for most of the bloggers. That said GTalk has a very annoying feature where any Instant Messages sent to you shows up as a notification and can be easily viewed by anyone who is near you computer or looking at your screen.

This can get pretty bad and allow anyone to view your personal or private chats. Other IM clients like Yahoo only show you the first message and the rest of it is suppressed to the IM window itself.

That said you can suppress the IM notifications in GTalk too and save yourself some privacy while chatting using GTalk.

To do that open the main GTalk window and click on the Settings link in the top right hand side. This will popup a new window from where you can access GTalk settings.

In the settings tab navigate to notifications and disable show notification under Incoming Chat options.

Once you do that click on the Ok button and all your IM notifications will be suppressed to the chat window just like Yahoo Messenger. This is a tiny tip that can help you save your privacy from others when you are surrounded by them near your PC.

Yahoo today released Yahoo Messenger 9 Beta with lots of exciting features for photo and video sharing. Yahoo Messenger is one of the most popular IM clients and is used by millions of people to converse with friends, family and colleagues.

Here are some of the Notable features that Yahoo Messenger 9 sports;

Flickr Photo Sharing

In addition to the desktop photo sharing Yahoo Messenger 8.1 had Yahoo Messenger 9 now allows you to share your Flickr photos with Yahoo contacts. You need to grant the Yahoo Messenger permission to use Flickr Stream to share photos first.

View Videos / Maps Inside Messenger Window

This is one more cool feature which I liked a lot which allows users to view videos right inside the messenger window itself. This is a neat feature as now you will not have to leave your the messenger window to watch videos sent to you by your friends and can enjoy it all in the comfort of your messenger itself.

Another thing I liked about this feature is that, it automatically detects the link and displays the video player without you having to do anything additional. It currently supports most of the popular video sites such as YouTube, Yahoo Video etc.

Forward Offline IM’s to SMS

Older Yahoo Messengers had a feature which would show you offline messages as soon as you logged in to the IM client. With Yahoo Messenger 9 you can now forward all your offline messages to your cell phone as an SMS. Pretty useful if you are expecting some important message from a friend and are unable to get online.

Better Contact Management

The new messenger sports a better contacts management, where you can view avatars of your friend, quickly send them an SMS, email or IM message. All your non IM contacts are now available as a separate group called Address Book doing away the tab that was available in the earlier version of YIM.

Gtalk Feature: Grouped Entries for Continuous Messages

Another new feature in the Yahoo Messenger 9 is a feature that already existed in Gtalk. In Gtalk when a person typed continuous messages without receiving a reply the messages is grouped together under a single entry. In older Yahoo Messengers every time you typed a message your id used to be shown along with the message.

Yahoo Messenger 9 now has the same feature as Gtalk and now shows continuous messages typed by the user without a reply as a group under a single entry. This helps in the conversation and makes reading easier. Check screen shot below.

Other Features

There are few other features in the new Yahoo Messenger 9 like new smiley’s, additional skins and localization version in more languages such as Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India (Hindi), and Vietnam.

My $0.02

The YIM 9 beta is a huge improvement over the earlier version and aims at making the IM a hub of social networking allowing you to share images and videos all within the IM client itself. I have been using it for the past 7 hours now and it works pretty smooth without any crashes yet.

The previous beta they had released for YIM 8 had lots of problems including crashes and incompatibility with old Yahoo version while sharing files. This version looks pretty much stable for a Beta.

Download the Yahoo Messenger 9 Beta or view a tour video of the latest messenger.

What are your thoughts about the new Yahoo Messenger 9 Beta? Has anyone suffered crashes yet? Do let me know through your valuable comments.

The Windows Live Writer blog announced today that they have a new version of Windows Live Writer Beta 2 ready for download. Not only that the new Windows Live Messenger 8.5 and Windows Live Mail Desktop is available for downloads so if you are using the leaked version of Windows Live Messenger time to get the genuine one.

I have been using and playing around with quite a few desktop publishing tools for quite some time and have always been missing few key features in Live Writer like these:

1. No Inline Spell Check.
2. Was not able to add in new categories.
3. Could not add excerpts to posts.
4. Adding keywords to posts did not work.

But the new Beta release 2 is just awesome and has all the above features and more. The new Windows Live Writer Beta 2 adds more features;

Authoring Features

• Inline spell checking
• Table editing
• Ability to add categories
• Page authoring for WordPress and TypePad
• Support for excerpts and extended entries
• Improved hyperlinking and image insertion
• Paste Special

Integration Features

• SharePoint 2007 support
• New APIs enabling custom extensions by weblog providers
• Automatic synchronization of local and online edits
• Integration with Windows Live Gallery
• Support for Blogger Labels

And finally the new plus that is a complete new look and feel and availability in 6 languages. Overall I am quite excited to use the new features as I said I always had a sore point on missing them in Live writer.

Do you publish from your desktop too? If so which platform do you use to publish to your blog. Do let me know through your comments,

Web Messengers have been popping around a lot these days with sites Meebo leading the way. But it wasn’t long before the big web players caught up with the game.

Google integrated the Gtalk within Gmail allowing users to talk to their friends inside the browser. MSN has their own web messenger so Yahoo couldn’t be left far behind.

Yahoo have launched their own Web Messenger today which will allow users to chat using their browsers. This was after Yahoo had already done a integration of chat into their Yahoo Beta Mail site.

You will require a Flash 9 client to make use of the Yahoo Web Messenger along with a web broswer. As with their desktop client  the web messenger is integrated with MSN messenger are you can add your live / msn contacts to your  Yahoo friends list. The Yahoo Web Messenger has the usual suspects of tabs, where each new contact is opened in a seperate tab. It also allows you to change your status while your using the Messenger.

This is really a good news since many offices  and schools ban chat clients, so it would be easier to chat with your friends now using just a browser.

Looking ahead such integration into the browser just makes  the browser  more useful and powerful, there may come one day when you do not have to install any software other than your browser to make use of all the applications.  And the fight for OS may end up becoming the fight for browser.

gtalk the instant messenger service has started to shed its inhibitions of being a plain im client and has added features to its new clients other than the existing voice and text base services.

 the newer version of gtalk now has avtaars and themes, which are similar in kind of the things msn and yahoo! messengers have.

here are some of the screenshots i have

messenger 

{mosimage width=400&height=400}

 settings choose themes

 {mosimage width=400&height=400}

google has also launched the google talk for blackberry.

you can download the latest version of gtalk from here .