8hands for Social Networking: Better Than Digsby?

From my previous post about Digsby, one person left a comment mentioning 8hands. Personally, I think it was probably a way to get the word out about it. Why do I say this? Keep reading to find out.

First, before I start with telling you the things I like and dislike about 8hands, I want to let you know that I do like Digsby a lot. But, only because it allows me to use just one application for instant messaging, social networking and e-mail if I choose! It also isn’t ugly.

The person who left the comment about 8hands said:

Nothing seems to work, and as written, the memory leak is impossible to deal with.

I have yet to see a memory leak. Digsby did use more memory than it should, but that was before the recent update. Try Digsby again. But, I have not seen a memory leak, so that must have been a really early beta version. 8hands even uses much more memory than Digsby does. Currently, 8hands is using 75MB and Digsby is only using 32MB.

I’m sticking with my 8hands which offers some of its features. The IM in 8hands is limited to social networks friends, but the notifications are way better and it supports all social networks, not only Myspace and Facebook.

Some features? How about one feature? It only offers social networking and instant messaging to social network friends. Digsby offers social networking, instant messaging for Yahoo!, MSN, AIM, Google Talk, etc., and e-mail. 8hands also does not support all social networks as she says. It’s limited to: Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and maybe one more. It also supports RSS feeds, but I’ll stick to Google Reader for that.

Regarding the notifications being better, I found this to be untrue. Digsby allows me to reply to instant messages right from the notification popup. What can be better than that? What does 8hands do? It shows me what someone has said and lets me click on it to open it in a browser. I’m sorry to whoever likes that, but I’d prefer not opening a browser just to reply. If I wanted to use a browser, I wouldn’t use a desktop application. The reason I have a desktop application is to bring everything to my desktop.

Speaking of the notification popup, give me time to read long messages. It starts hiding just a couple seconds after it appeared, making it impossible to finish reading the end of the message because it’s already hidden.

Also, whenever there is a new notification, I can’t scroll in the current window I’m in. It’s like the notification popup becomes the active window.

Something else I don’t like, although I like the color purple, I do not want to see purple on the application! It just doesn’t go well with my desktop. It’s ugly, let me customize this. Yahoo! Messenger even let me change from the purple to another color.

One thing I do like about 8hands is the history window. But, it doesn’t seem to show full messages. In order to view full messages, you have to click on the one you want to view and it opens a browser window. Digsby allows me to read full Facebook history. I don’t use MySpace, so I don’t know about that one. It would be great if Digsby had a history window to view all IM and social network history. Currently, it only lets you view IM history.

To DownloadSquad.com, no, 8hands is not “almost perfect”. I think it has a long ways to go still. I’m not saying Digsby is perfect either, but it offers more.

I’m not trying to give a harsh review of 8hands, but I expected more when I tried it out and it wasn’t really all that. If I want updates for Facebook, Twitter or Pownce, I’ll use one of the Facebook applications, Snitter and Pownce’s client if I want to use a desktop application, which keep me on the desktop and doesn’t force me to open a browser. And, yes, 8hands brings those together instead of using multiple applications, but, I shouldn’t have to use a browser. Digsby needs improvements with this as well.

Comparing to Digsby, it doesn’t have much more. Both are still very new and need some work. Hopefully soon Digsby will have more social networks to choose from, such as Twitter. For now, using Google Talk and receiving Twitter updates via IM works just fine. The one advantage 8hands has over Digsby is a few more social network choices. But that will eventually change as they add more.

Please note, that I spent about half an hour playing with 8hands which is the same amount of time I used for Digsby. Digsby was easier to setup and faster. 8hands seems to have a longer response time when doing things (causing the busy cursor to appear a lot).

I would like to hear about your experiences with either 8hands or Digsby in the comments.