Fishbowl – Facebook Desktop Client optimized for Windows 7

With the announcement of Silverlight 4 on day 2 at PDC09, Silverface, a desktop application for Facebook, was demoed. Two days back, an application called Fishbowl was released by UXLabs@Microsoft. This application is a sample Facebook client that lets you update you status, scroll through your news feeds, easily browse through friends, browse and upload photos etc and is specially optimized for Windows 7.

If you’re a Windows 7 user then you should definitely give this application a try. It has special integration for taskbar and jumplists. You can switch between your home screen, your friends, photos etc and also launch Facebook in your browser with one click through your taskbar.

You can also view recent notifications and switch to mini-mode (described later) through jumplists. Besides these features it also has support for multi-touch.

Fishbowl can be switched to mini-mode which you can choose to always float on top of other applications and can be accessed from the taskbar as well.. It allows you to easily read through your feeds, launch Facebook homepage in your browser and also displays your notifications.

Fishbowl lets you sort your friends according to latest status updates, upcoming birthdays and interest level. Interest level is a feature for your convenience that lets you hide news feeds from a particular friend by adjusting it on their profile.

What I like best about Fishbowl is the photos section. It lets you browse through photos smoothly, gives you an option to print/save individual photos and save an entire photo album! It can also display an album as slideshow for hands free photo viewing. Uploading pictures through Fishbowl is a treat since its possible by simply dragging and dropping!

Another one of my favorite features is spell check. I love the fact that Fishbowl is spelling friendly.

It also makes it possible to zoom in and out on your homepage, pictures, etc. Online contacts are indicated with a green dot besides their name and notifications are displayed neatly in the top right corner of the application.

One thing that is missing is that you can’t access your messages through this application and it is also not possible to like pictures in photo albums. Another drawback is that although you can run this application on Windows XP and Windows Vista, it requires .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 to be installed.

You can Download Fishbowl here and join their group on Facebook  to give feedback.