Want to read your friends’ status updates even when you can’t have the social network site open in your browser, like when you’re at the office? A new application called Facebook Desktop does exactly that.
When friends post updates, comment on a photo, create a new tag or do anything else that would trigger a story to go out to others’ newsfeeds, Facebook Desktop users will receive notifications on their desktops, similar to how instant messages appear.
Facebook Desktop also sends notifications about new messages, group invites, event invites and friend requests. The application works on both Windows and Apple platforms, as you’ll find when you download the free application here.
The need for these capabilities is summed up by the application’s creator, Chris Bihis, an engineer at Adobe, in a post on WebProNews:
I moved away from my home in Vancouver for work and so Facebook has been a great tool to help keep me in touch with everyone. I found, though, that the browser metaphor for the Facebook ‘stream’ just wasn’t working for me. I didn’t like refreshing my home page constantly to see what people were up to. I also didn’t like keeping a browser open whenever I wanted to read some of my friends posts. So, I made a simple AIR app that hits the Facebook APIs, grabs the latest posts, and delivers them to me in an unobtrusive way. I ended up finding it so useful, I started adding more and more features, like the ability to pause or resume, replay missed notifications, update my status, etc. Eventually, I was encouraged by a friend to polish it up and release it for others to use, and so here we are!
Is Bihis’ desktop version of Facebook something you would use?
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