There are over a dozen of desktop clients out there that enable users to access Facebook without visiting the social networking website itself. One of the latest in town is Microsoft’s Silverlight 4 Beta Client for Facebook. Although the tech juggernaut has already released SilverFace and FishBowl on April and November last year respectively, but neither of them is as impressive and awesome as its successor. Runs on both Windows and Mac OS X, the Silverlight client for Facebook works really fast and its user interface is way beyond words can describe. It comes complete with essential functionalities — Status updates, photo browsing, mail and even a neat photo uploading tool. I personally love its dark interface.
On the home screen, you would see the News Feeds in the middle, with the filters located on the left. The right section is pretty outstanding — mouse over the random pictures and the user who uploaded them. Posting your first update using this client may be an “arduous” task to some because the option isn’t as prominent as the original Facebook website. Click on the “What’s on your mind?” link located at the top of your news feed and a box will appear.
Another interesting feature you may love is its interesting way of searching your mutual friends on Facebook. Head over to the “People” section and select the alphabet that matches the first letter of your friend’s name. A pretty extraordinary feature that brings to my attention is this app’s unique and clever photo tagging feature. Simply hover your mouse over the tag names and it will instantly highlight the tagged person in the photo.
Frankly speaking, this Silverlight client is definitely what I’ve been craving for the past few months. I don’t using the Facebook website — it’s slow and has way too much junk. However, I’m a little disappointed that it doesn’t have any chat functionality. It would be great if the folks at Microsoft were to roll in such useful feature in its next version.
Give it a try it out today! It’s undoubtedly the best desktop clients for Facebook I’ve ever stumbled across!
