As is evidenced by the new Twitter sidebar, I’ve decided to give in and setup a Twitter account.  To coincide with it, I’m also switching from Pidgin to Digsby.

It seems like there’s so many social networking sites that it’s frustrating to keep up with any and all the new stuff.  It’s often been asked why I don’t have a MySpace or Facebook page and I respond that I have a website of my own and that’s enough.  Secretly, I feel like they’re the modern day Geocities and most of the pages I look at are HORRIBLY designed.  Certainly I’m able to do much more with my web site than the constraints put on what can be done on MySpace/Facebook, but people kinda just look at me funny and shrug it off.  This is the first sign that I’m becoming a crotchety old man though.

Yes, I realize as I’m listening to TWiT that they frequently talk about Twitter and it’s many uses.  But to me, when I heard the idea of Twitter, I was thinking it was a little absurd and stalker-ish to let everyone know what I’m doing.  That or it could become quite juvenile as evidenced by this PA Comic.  So I sort of left it by the wayside for now.

Then it dawns on me.  Paul Thurrot says that there are people like his mom or grandmother (I forget offhand) who simply won’t use an ATM machine and he gets it.  I get that I’m turning into that and I’m afraid I’m gonna lose my nerd street credibility!  Crotchety old man syndrome is kicking in.  On the one hand, I’m a lot more cautious about software now than I ever was before having lived through the Morpheus/Kazaa days of super spyware destroying your computer.  But now we’ve sort of evolved a bit past that with things like Ad-Aware and Spybot.  I’ve become a technological hermit even though technology is something I’m passionate about!

So I’m breaking down my misconceptions and going back to trying out software even despite the fact that I may already have something that serves that purpose and might be better.  This isn’t to say I’m going to get a MySpace/Facebook account though, I’m still not too keen on that.  But I’ll open up to Twitter for now.  It’s got a great set of tools for integration into the site and it’s opened it’s API up to things like Digsby.

Which brings me to Digsby!  I love it so far.  I had been a GAIM user then something bad happened on one build so I switched to Trillian, then I hated Trillian because I felt like it was slightly bloated but maybe more accurately it felt slower loading up, then I went back to GAIM when it became Pidgin and now I’ve been convinced that Digsby is totally the future of the IM super client so far.  It integrates all the popular IM clients as well as MySpace/Facebook/Twitter and email clients (Gmail/MSN/Yahoo/Pop).

The best thing about it so far is that compared to Pidgin, I was able to exclude people from sending me an IM if they weren’t on my buddy list.  Which Pidgin didn’t have, I had to install the regular IM client to enable that.  I’ve recently had a problem with spam IMs.  However, no longer!  I know I’m gushing now so just go to the site and try it out yourself.