Social Home

Social networks are not only popular nowadays, but are also the main portal of distributing news, playing games, sharing files, and keeping in touch with other individuals. Just so you don’t depend on your web browser for staying connected on your favorite social network, Social Home can easily help you in this regard.

Because of the tools used to create the application, it requires .NET Framework to be installed on your PC if you are to benefit from all it has to offer. Once installed, and launched, a press of a button is enough to launch the service of your choice. Needless to say that credentials are also required to log into your own account.

The main window is fitted with a custom-made interface which poses no accommodation problems whatsoever. The only inconvenience here is that it can’t be minimized, and it takes quite a bit of space on your desktop. What’s more, the network you connect to is brought up in a different window, which can’t be minimized either.

Truth be told, the application bundles quite an impressive variety of social networks, such as Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo!, Twitter, Amazon, Google, iTunes, YouTube, Flickr, Yelp, Wikipedia, Orkut and LastFM. Sadly, you can only access one of them at a time, but you can launch another instance of the application at the risk of overwhelming your desktop with yet another pair of windows which can’t be minimized.

In fact, the application is nothing more than a custom-made web browser, stripped of a URL field, and dedicated to the service you wish to connect to. On the other hand, navigation between pages is easily done through the set of controls, and since you can launch Google as well, nearly any page can be reached.

To sum it up, Social Home can spark quite a bit of interest at first, especially because of the visually appealing interface, and the variety of social networks it connects you to. However, with the frustrating lack of a minimize option, limited view space, and difficult method of connecting to more services at a time, it can make you look for alternatives, or stick to conventional ways.