Friend WatchDog

Friend WatchDog is a software program that enables you to monitor the activity of some of your friends on Skype and Facebook, by retrieving information about their status and the periods of time when they were online.

The installation process does not last very long and does not pose any kind of issues. Nonetheless, you should know that you are required to have Skype installed on your machine.

The app’s interface can only be described as simple and clean, seeing it consists of several buttons, a few boxes and multiple tabs which enable you to easily access all the available options. Comprehensive and well-drawn Help contents are included, thus enabling both power and novice users to easily find their way around Friend WatchDog.

This application automatically detects your Skype account and displays your friend names in the form of a list in the main window. When it comes to logging in to Facebook, you are required to provide your user name and password, after which all your connections are going to be listed alphabetically in a dedicated tab.

Aside from that, regardless of the account you are interested in checking, you should know it is possible to select a friend, and view a graphical representation of the hours between which he or she was online.

You can easily zoom in and out of the graph, as well as reset it to the default values. A search function is incorporated for both types of accounts, so that you can easily find the person that interests you.

Logs are available in a dedicated tab, and it is possible for you to enable or disable details, as well as send the gathered information to a specified e-mail address.

To conclude, Friend WatchDog is a pretty efficient piece of software when it comes to checking to see when your friends were online. The interface is pretty intuitive and the amount of resources required in order to function fully is quite low. We did not come by any errors or crashes in our tests, however the response time leaves a lot to be desired.