Digsby - Don’t Announce Something You Don’t Have

Over the course of the year I have been following the development of Digsby, which can be described as a Swiss Army Knife for the Internet.

First, it’s a multi-protocol IM client, with support for AIM, Yahoo, MSN, GTalk, ICQ, Jabber/XMPP, and Facebook. Second, it’s an email monitor, capable of notifying you of new mail from Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, and any old IMAP or POP-accessible email account. Finally, it’s a social networking client with support for Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and Linked In.

In short, with one application you can monitor and interact with all of the common communications services online. IM, Email, and Social, all right there.

When a fellow colleague introduced me to Digsby, I was ecstatic. All this functionality in a single application. No more having fifteen different tabs open at all times just to be connected with the services I use. No more needing a separate IM and Twitter client. I clicked the giant “Free Download” button and smiled as I saw three icons, one for Mac OS X, one for Windows, and the last for Linux. I clicked the silver Apple logo.

Much to my dismay, this page is what I saw.

I filled out that form to be notified of its release, and heard nothing from the Digsby people for a long time. Eventually an email arrived in my Inbox on September 25th of this year, announcing that the, “new Digsby is smaller, faster, and better than ever!”

I’m sure it is. The irony here is that the text, “we don’t spam” appears beneath the email address field on that form. I signed up to be notified of the Mac version, and instead was notified about the Windows version. That’s spam in my book. That page is still accessible because today there is still no Mac or Linux version of Digsby. So much for “coming soon.”

The purpose of announcing unreleased products is to drum up interest for that product, and doing so is always a gamble. Everything you say about that product is going to serve as a benchmark by which the final version is tested. If you state that your unreleased product will do X, Y, and Z, and the final product skips on Z entirely, you lied to your prospective customers/clients. If you state that your unreleased Swiss Army Knife of the Internet is “coming soon” and many months later send an email to people who signed up to be notified of its release that a version they cannot use is now available, you’re just as guilty. I’m sure the people working on Digsby are nice and have the best intentions, but that doesn’t change the fact they’re still misleading people about their product.

A company can get away with this when the product is free, as Digsby is, but it has cost Microsoft a lot of money with Windows Vista. Shipped years late and missing several big-ticket features, Vista is a flop, and Microsoft knows it. That’s why the first beta of its successor, Windows 7, is being rushed out to MSDN conference attendees later this month.

I still look forward to using Digsby, but I’m not holding my breath for its release. In the meantime, I’ll keep tabs on the project for anything resembling something I can install on my Mac, and will keep you posted on isdigsbyavailableformac.com.

written at December 4th, 2008 and is filed under Social Networking, apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.