Socializer (formerly Facebook)

With the Internet opening up new communication methods, social networks started going viral. Amongst others, Facebook has managed to make a name for itself, being one, if not the most important player on the market. Dedicated to this service, Socializer comes as a means to bring interactions with your buddies or business associates right to your desktop.

At its core, the application is nothing more than a web browser specially built to support just Facebook. Leaving all other features of a browser aside, it attempts to focus on fast response time and refresh rate. However, taking a look at resource consumption reveals the goal is not entirely achieved.

Needless to say that once the application starts you are greeted by the Facebook home page. As such, you need to own an account to fully take advantage of its features, or take your time to create one on the spot. Don't forget that an active Internet connection is also mandatory.

Visually speaking, the interface is well polished, with high-quality menu elements all stored in an upper toolbar, dedicating the rest of the space to what actually interests you. Navigation controls let you move back and forth through pages since you can't open up more tabs. There are even a few color themes like cofee, grenify, pinky, skyblue, tango and ubuntu so you can make it blend with your desktop.

Multiple instances of the application can be kept active at a time so you can connect to different accounts, without affecting the other. If you happen to scroll too much down the page, you can use a dedicated button to get back to the top.

When not active, the application sits quietly in the system tray, while accessing the corresponding menu displaying the number of new friend requests, unread messages and notifications. We literally mean it sits quiet, because it completely lacks any form of notifications.

This cuts a great deal of practicality, because even the default web browser gives off audio feedback. As such, you need to keep the main window active at all times to stay up to date with all changes. What's more, you can't adjust the size of the main window by dragging its borders. The only way to get a bigger picture is scrolling through the few size presets it comes with, so you'll have to adjust window arrangement on your desktop according to them.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Socializer does indeed manage to enhance Facebook interactions, but not by much. The idea behind the concept is neat and gives you full access to everything you can normally do while on a web browser. However, even if you happen to overlook system resources used, practicality is considerably cut off by the lack of alerts.