Created by a computer scientist at Adobe, Facebook Desktop does exactly what it says on the tin, for both Windows and Mac PCs. It links into your Facebook account and notifies you of every change to your account -- pokes, messages, friend requests, event invites, etc. -- with a little pop-up toast window on your desktop. The notifications appear in the bottom right of your screen whether you like it or not -- you can't change it to another corner, and you can't change their appearance.

Still, Facebook Desktop works. Beyond notifications, it also lets you publish status updates -- but as you have to go via a tiny system tray icon, and there's no way to set a global hotkey, it's probably easier to just pop open a browser window and update your status normally.

The only problem -- for some people, anyway -- is that Facebook Desktop is an Adobe AIR app. It's advertised as "lightweight", but a 45MB memory footprint for an app that pops up toast windows seems a little on the chunky side. By default it loads on computer start-up, too, which is a bit obnoxious -- you can disable that in the settings, though.

Oh, it also requests a truly insane number of permissions when connecting to your Facebook account (picture after the break). Understandably, it needs to check a lot of things, but it doesn't need permission to publish check-ins, or insight data for my Pages. Heck, why does it even need my name, profile picture and gender?