Friendbar v2 is an interesting application that
helps keep you updated on Twitter and Facebook posts. You can easily download Friendbar for free
from Firefox. Once it is installed the
application appears in your toolbar. Friendbar
looks like a ticker tape where your friend’s status updates scroll a crossed
the top of the page in the toolbar.
With Friendbar you can log into Twitter, Facebook,
or both and keep track of what is going on while you are doing other things
online. This way you do not have to keep
jumping back to the actual Twitter and Facebook sites to stay in touch. You can simply glance up to keep an eye on
what is going on. With the settings you can
make have it beep to alert you when a new update comes in and it also flashes
yellow.
With the settings you can chose to have replies, direct
messages, text, pictures, or text and pictures scroll at the top of the
page. The pictures come from people’s
Facebook albums the shots are small but if you hover the curser over them a
larger image pops up with information about where the picture came from and whose
it is. If you do not want to see the updates you can hide them while staying
logged in to Twitter and Facebook. If
you select text only the posts are very similar to Twitter in that they include
the profile picture, name, the person’s actual name, where the post came from
either Twitter or Facebook and how long ago the post came in. If no new posts are coming in than it scrolls
back through past posts. You can chose
how many posts it will scroll back through.
You can also manually go forward or backward through the posts.
There is a button for replying, re-tweeting, and
sending direct messages right on the post itself and there is also a URL button
that automatically shortens the URL of the site that you are currently at and
puts it into the post. You can easily log into or out of Twitter and/or
Facebook on the Friendbar. The size of
the bar itself is adjustable which is very helpful because the standard size is,
in my opinion, a little too small.
With the settings you can chose; the ticker scrolling style between fade,
slide, or no effect, the background color of the bar between blue or gray, how
many messages it plays back through, and how many seconds each message stays on
the screen for. It also gives the option
of playing a sound when a new post comes in.
There is also a button that brings you to a list of your Facebook
friends so that you can invite others to use Friendbar. You can chose whether
or not to show the quickpost or the Lucky Site button. With quickpost you can type in something in
advance and then just hit the button to post it. However it adds more to you message such as “Twitter / Home, http://bit.ly/173kD. Sent from my Friendbar.” There is a Google
and now Twitter search bar, where you can chose which of these two you would
like to search. Also you can adjust the number of tweets made by Friendbar from
low which is forty an hour, medium which is sixty five and hour, or high which
is 90 an hour. Here there is a link for
help and information about Friendbar. Once
you are on the help page there is another link for Customer Support where you
can ask questions, share ideas, report problems, and give praise. Friendbar employees will actually respond to
your posts with answers and advice. Other
similar applications to Friendbar include Twitter Toolbar, Yoono,
Twits Like Me, Twitter Friends Bio, and The Twitter Toolbar.
One problem with
the application is that it crashes. You
can still post but it stops showing you updates from Twitter and Facebook. When asked a Friendbar employee said that “We have found a
quirk with a specific type of proxy server. We are testing a fix now. Hopefully
this will be fixed in our next release… We've seen similar issues when users
have a proxy set up in their Firefox network preferences. If you select No
Proxy it seems to work. Please try that and let us know. We are trying to see
if there is another workaround.” Also the
application is good for keeping track of what is going on at the moment. It is hard to catch up with what people said
in the past because you see the posts
one by one and in reverse order of the way they came in so conversations are
hard to follow. Plus if a new message
comes in you are interrupted by it. The application is good for staying in
touch while doing other things and to easily post and reply to others but not particularly
for speed even though you can chose how quickly the messages scroll. Currently
there is not yet a way to mark items as read so it scrolls back through
everything each time.
There were several other problems in past versions
of the application but Friendbar has assured us that they have been fixed.
UPDATE: All of these issues have been
fixed in the latest release!
- Problems with very large Facebook Accounts: If your
Facebook account is really large, say over 500 or 1000 friends (depends
on the speed of your CPU and your network), Friendbar will not work well.
In fact, if you have that many friends, we don’t recommend using this
release. We know what we have to fix, and we’ll do it in our next release,
which should be ready in a matter of days.
- Broken links: If you
see a link in a Facebook update or Twit with a period or a “)” at the end
- e.g. if the link was at the end of a sentence or in parentheses, we
don’t do a good job of stripping them out in this version. We’ll fix this
as well.
- Need for a Facebook Account: Some
people just want to use Friendbar to read their Twitter feed, but right
now you need to log into your Facebook account. We’ll change the next
version so that you can use it just for Twitter.
- Buttons: Its unclear whether some
of our buttons are active or inactive due to the graphics we use. We’ll
fix them to make them clearer.
