Microsoft launched Fishbowl, a Silverlight-Powered, Desktop-Based Facebook Client

I've been following news regarding the annually-held Professional Developers Conference (PDC), where this year Microsoft really debuted tonnes of stuffs, from the latest news on Internet Explorer 9, Windows Azure, Microsoft .NET 4, the newly unveiled Silverlight 4 and then...Fishbowl, a Facebook Client!


It sounded pretty unusual that Microsoft would even spend precious time & resources in developing something like this but hey, they must be Facebook fans as well! After their preview of the upcoming Silverlight 4, they demoed Fishbowl, which is now officially available for download. Not only does Fishbowl provide a nice, clean display of your stream, but Fishbowl stand out as a better Facebook client than any other applications because it is packed with excellent stability & features (some not even available on Facebook itself), is pretty responsive (even more so if you have a high-end machine), and extremely intuitive to use.

Although Fishbowl supports the 32-bit version of Windows XP and both the 32 & 64-bit of Vista and 7, Microsoft has stated that the application is designed best for Windows 7, and it's no wonder why. Yes, Windows 7 is the latest OS released by the corporation from Redmond, but its features notably the Windows 7 taskbar with jumplist (as shown in the image below) and Aero Peek, gives Fishbowl an edge in terms of design & usage over XP and Vista. Most importantly, Fishbowl is designed to be touch-screen supported, meaning that users of Windows 7 can literally control Facebook using their fingers!

Some of Fishbowl's best features I immediately noticed is the way it lets you explore photos & friends' pages. Pick an album/friend to browse, then flip through the images/friends list using your mouse's scroll wheel. Zoom is also supported (you can zoon in and out anytime!), and you can also print or save images (or an entire album) in a single click. There's even a full screen Slideshow Mode for hands-free viewing. As for uploading your own images, the drag-and-drop feature heavily used in Windows makes uploading an almost-too-easy task with Fishbowl.

However, if you've gotten used to browsing Facebook using Firefox, Chrome, Opera or any other relatively unknown browser, be prepared for some slow speed, because Fishbowl is probably using IE8's rendering engine (it's Microsoft's product, after all), so opening external web content is going to feel slow. Also, Fishbowl is notably slow at rendering walls on profile pages, which sort of showed off Silverlight's weakness.There are options for users to change the color of the application, but then the color choices are limited (though it looks good) if you're a hardcore customizor, anyway.

To conclude all, if you're a user of Microsoft Windows XP & above, a Facebook user and a hardcore photo-sharing and status-updating person, then Fishbowl's the right tool for you!

Visit Fishbowl's official website here.