Facebook Updates sent to your Desktop via Subsume [Mac Only]
A relatively unknown experimental freeware called Subsume provides you with Growl notifications every time your Facebook and MySpace friends update their statuses. When I first started writing for Make Use Of, I covered MoodBlast, which sends out status updates to popular social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook but this application does the opposite, mainly.
Subsume currently only supports updates from Facebook and MySpace friends. It integrates nicely with Address Book, showing the picture attached for the contact but is optional and you can have Subsume work independently from Address Book. Besides that, every time a computer joins or leaves your network, Subsume will let you know; and can even automatically send out status updates for you on Adium and iChat when you watch something in VLC, Joost, Miro or DVD Player (so your friends know to leave you alone!)
More specifically, Subsume will provide you with alerts regarding:
- New Notifications from Facebook
- New Wall Posts
- Status Updates from Facebook and MySpace
- Connected/disconnected computer son your local network (Bonjour)
Subsume is more or less for the people who enjoy checking out what their friends are up to. This is the kind of program which you turn on and leave it on in the background, if you know what I mean. Since it works with Growl, Subsume pretty much feels like it is part of the system, not a separate application and doesn’t really bother me or decrease my productivity. My only gripe is that I can’t get the Subsume Dock icon to hide when I run the application. It also sets itself to start on login, so that saves a bit of trouble.
Subsume hasn’t been updated since November last year but still it is quite functional and does the job. Maybe if there were more Subsume users, that would encourage its creator to focus more attention and time into the project.
Subsume is compatible with Tiger and Leopard and again, it’s free.
(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time medical student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationship, studies and his future.
good idea, poor execution (or just too new). subsume has to be open to get notifications from facebook and deliver them to growl and it doesn’t remember what it has shown you since last time it ran so if you quit and re-open it you see all notifications again, stretching back to who knows how long ago. it also requires address book be open to make use of its data.
trashman’s advice: wait until the next rev of this app.
Yup agreed. Subsume requires the entire application to be open, it doesn’t run a daemon (which would be better visually anyway).
I’d rather use Digsby for this and more.
Nice concept!