A couple of weeks ago, I found out about a new chat client to rival the one I have used for so long. Digsby is the name. I instantly fell in love with it. It has all of the features that Trillian, Pidgin, and other “All in one” chat clients have. What it does have that those others don’t is the ability to hook in your e-mail, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter into it. So now when I receive an email to any of the accounts that I have hooked up, I will see a small alert show up telling me. The same with Facebook or Twitter. The small alerts are an easy way to keep up to date to what is going on with friends you might have on those sites.

As good as Digsby is, it did have its issues. My work computer runs on Vista Professional and apparently Digsby has a memory leak issue with Vista that after a few hours, required a reboot. My home computer which runs XP 64 bit seemed fine. Another reason why Vista isn’t too good. Anyhow, I just read today that Digsby released an update that helps fix some of the issues that plagued it before. I actually just made the update and see that the memory usage is lower than it used to be.

Overall, I would pick Digsby over any other chat client hands down. There really isn’t any other program that combines all the features that I can find in Digsby. So check it out and tell me what you think.

Popularity: 39% [?]

So it’s been a while since I wrote but it’s partially because of stuff I’ve been doing with Facebook. That and I’m lazy. I’ve worked on teams that have released 3 applications and in the process of finishing 1 at work right now. Along with those, I’ve personally released 1 and have 2 that I have in the works. So lots of apps in my head right now.

The first app we did is called Finders Keepers. It is a really cool wishlist site where you can keep products on your Wishlist, send your friends items for their Wishlists or buy products. It was my first adventure into a real, fully functional, Facebook application. It was tough but it all came together thanks to a great team and I am proud to say that I worked on it. It is going through some major revisions so keep an eye out for those in the upcoming weeks.

The second app we did was for the Pontiac Game Changing Performance. We worked with ESPN for the College Football season and just last week released the new version for College Basketball just in time for March Madness. We implemented a really nice recruiting component for it that I think helps out with the social aspect that all applications strive to find.

The third application is one that hasn’t been fully released yet but I used the new Facebook JavaScript Client Library. Using this allows you to write applications that do not need to live within the Facebook site. Now any site that can use JavaScript can use it. Really nice and once more documentation shows up, it will get only better.

Personally, I released an RSS reader application last October while I was trying to learn just how the API worked. You can find it here. Simply put, the user adds the feed that they want, how many items, and there it is. Still has some issues with it I am finding but not too bad for a first time app I think. Add it and let me know what you think.

So pretty much since October, I have been working on Facebook apps. I’ve done some in ASP.NET C# and a couple in PHP. I gotta say that each has its pros but being a .NET guy, I had a bit of an easier time with those. But that’s the beauty with the Facebook apps. It doesn’t matter what your comfort level is. You can do it in any language it seems. Facebook releases theirs in PHP and Java but there are many APIs written in whatever language you want. At Terralever, we wrote our own API for the .NET framework and I find it really easy to work with.

So if you’re wanting to get into writing your own Facebook app, it’s really easy to get started. There is a lot of people out there to help now. So do what I did and build a dinky little app and go from there.

Popularity: 68% [?]

Hey everyone. I have neglected this blog for too long. I apologize for that. But I have made it a resolution to try to blog more about things that I have been doing at work (Facebook apps) and other things that I feel like talking about.

I’ve got a couple of posts in the hopper that I am still working on so look for those. I also have a follow up to the popular iPod Touch vs iPhone posts a did a couple of months ago.

Popularity: 42% [?]