Adobe’s Desktop Client for Facebook is Better than the Official App

Some of may know that Facebook provides a desktop client - Facebook for AIR - that you may use to update your own status on Facebook from the desktop or for reading status updates, notes, photos and other items posted by your other Facebook friends.

This "official" desktop client is built using Adobe AIR and therefore works on Mac and Windows alike.

There's however a problem with the client - it offers very limited functionality and there's no support for notifications so you won't come to know of new updates in your news-steam unless the Facebook for AIR client is running in the foreground.

In fact, you can use Twitter clients like Seesmic or TweetDeck to track Facebook updates without logging into the Facebook website and these clients even provide desktop notifications so you'll probably find them for useful than the official Facebook app.

Facebook Desktop Client for Adobe AIR

If you are a Facebook addict but aren't really satisfied with the official Facebook client, here's something you'll absolutely love.  Adobe has released a new desktop client for Facebook - Photo Uploader* - that lets you do everything on Facebook from the desktop itself including chat.

Here's a quick run-down of the features in Adobe's desktop client for Facebook.

You can chose to run Adobe's Facebook Client in either the narrow mode or the wide mode that displays image thumbnails and also lets you comment on Facebook posts from the desktop itself (see the next screenshot).

You can click the name of any Facebook contact in your news stream and it will open his or her complete profile in the desktop client itself without launching the browser.

You may then see what groups are they subscribed to and what Facebook pages that they are a fan of.

And, as obvious from the name of the Facebook client, you can not only upload photos from the desktop to your online Facebook photo albums but may also view existing Facebook albums as a self-running slideshow on the desktop without having to download that album.

And like the official Facebook App, this un-official but better desktop client for Facebook is also powered by Adobe AIR and you may therefore install it on Windows, Mac and Linux. Give it a shot, it's good.