Wouldn’t it be nice if your computer could just automatically do a Facebook login and provide you with an alert whenever anything new happens? Or wouldn’t it be wonderful to just pop open a little application on your mobile phone that would show all of your friends’ latest updates?

All of these things and more are possible – there are many ways to login to Facebook without going to the website, and in this post I’m going to detail four methods that you can use to do so. The four ways you can log into Facebook without directly navigating to the website and logging in is with your cellphone, with a desktop aggregator, with an Internet based aggregator, or through a desktop gadget.

1. Monitor Facebook on Your Computer With Digsby or Trillian

Since I spend a large majority of my time sitting in front of the same laptop while I’m writing articles, the ideal way for me to do a Facebook login without going to the website is through a desktop aggregator. Now, personally I use Digsby because I prefer the interface and I find it very easy to quickly update my status or add comments to my friends’ posts.

It saves a great deal of time because Digsby automatically logs into all of your social networks the moment you boot up your computer, and it immediately reports whenever there are any updates. You can review and respond to them right in the interface. If this sounds like the choice for you, make sure to check out David’s article on Digsby to learn more.

Now, it wouldn’t be fair to mention the PC aggregator method of an automatic Facebook login without mentioning Trillian. There are many people who prefer Trillian Astra over every other IM/social networking client, and for good reason.

Just like Digsby, you can set up Trillian to login to Facebook automatically, and all you have to do to see Facebook updates is hover the mouse over your Facebook connection. While I don’t personally prefer the Trillian interface, I can certainly see why it would be the preferred client app for many people. If this app appeals to you, then stop navigating over to Facebook to log in and instead read Saikat’s explanation as to why Trillian is the best IM client.

2. Check Facebook on the Web With Online Aggregators

Now, if you don’t want to download any software to your computer, there are still ways that you can login to Facebook without having to navigate to the website all of the time. You can do this by using an online aggregator of all of the social networking tools that you use. These usually not only include Facebook, but also things like your IM accounts, blog accounts and Twitter or Myspace.

One of the oldest portals is often also an overlooked approach to logging into Facebook automatically – iGoogle. When you search iGoogle for Facebook gadgets, you’ll find a number of them. Most of them are similar and work fine.

For example, the gadget I chose above works well, and it lets you login to Facebook directly from your iGoogle page.

Now, if you prefer an online portal that aggregates all of the social networks you use (in addition to Facebook), there are two very popular options. If you’ve been following along here at MakeUseOf, then you may know what they are. First, the one that’s my own favorite – Zooloo.

Once you’ve got the widget set up to automatically log into your Facebook account, all you have to do is set Zooloo as your home page and it’ll log you into Facebook every time you load up your browser. Mahendra covered Zooloo in excellent detail just recently. It’s definitely an option people use to connect to Facebook that’s worth checking out.

A very close second favorite is a site Daniel covered called Second Brain, which organizes your online networks into interesting “collections.” Either approach you take, the online approach to logging into Facebook allows you to check your Facebook account from anywhere, possibly even if Facebook itself is blocked by a firewall.

3. Login to Facebook From the Vista Sidebar

While this approach is limited to Windows Vista users, it is another convenient method you can use to receive notifications of Facebook updates. I covered a few of those Vista sidebar options a while ago.

Of the available options, myFacebook is my favorite because it offers more information than other widgets, such as a scrolling update from your friends’ status comments. This widget automatically logs into Facebook when your computer boots, and you receive notification of private messages, pokes and friend notifications.

You can download MyFacebook from the Windows Live gallery.

Just keep in mind that when you do install it, you need to go through a few steps to confirm authentication with Facebook, including obtaining and entering a special login code, and clicking on a link in Facebook that allows the application to access your account details.

The good news is that the widget wizard goes through the setup process in a few very simple, easy-to-follow steps.

4. Accessing Facebook From Your Mobile

The fourth and most commonly sought-after method to access Facebook is with a mobile device. Whether people use a Blackberry, iPhone or Windows Mobile device, they want to login to their Facebook account while on the go. The good news is that there are several ways to do this, depending which mobile device you’re using.

My personal favorite that I’ve been using for some time is F’im, a Windows Mobile based app for mobile Facebook. With that said, if I was running Windows Mobile 6.0, I would probably download Microsoft’s official Windows Mobile Facebook app.

While the user online status screen looks pretty cool, many of the screens just look like straight Facebook mobile screens. However, what F’IM lacks in terms of creativity for status screens is the software’s ability to automatically post images from your phone to your Facebook account.

Do you have a favorite way to log into your Facebook account other than going to the website? Which solution do you prefer, mobile, desktop aggregator, desktop widget or online aggregator? Share your feedback in the comments section below.

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It became very clear to me that Facebook was not your high school teenage fad. I found folks from my old home town – some of them well into retirement age – happily posting status updates about their daily activities, struggles, joys and thoughts. This, I thought to myself (and still do), is something that’s going to have major social ramifications. I’m not really sure what they are going to be, but the proliferation of Facebook throughout the world and throughout most industries completely fascinates me.

However, there is this one little thing that absolutely annoyed me about Facebook. You have to go to the site, do the Facebook login, and keep it open in order to receive status updates, notices or alerts about what’s going on. Sure, you could configure your profile to send notifications to your email address, but then you have to constantly check your email – and who wants an email box completely spammed by Facebook notifications? So, after buying a new PC with Windows Vista installed – complete with neat desktop sidebar applications – I started looking for a way to do the Facebook login automatically and receive instant status updates directly to my desktop, without having to log into Facebook all the time.

During that search, I discovered two perfect free Facebook login tools – the Facebook Sidebar Gadget, and MyFacebook. Just to save you some time – I opted for MyFacebook because it offered more interactive features. If you’d rather go for that, scroll down to the MyFacebook section. However, I also wanted to review the Facebook Gadget as well – and since that’s the one I tried first, I’ve reviewed it first.

Automatic Facebook Login With The Sidebar Gadget

For widgets and applications that automatically connect to your Facebook account, you need to acquire and configure a special number that gives that application “permission” to check your Facebook account for you. When you download the gadget and click on the file to install it, it’ll place the gadget on your sidebar as shown here.

When you click on “Login” the app automatically opens to your Facebook page, where you’ll need to do the regular Facebook login if you haven’t already. There, you’ll see this window.

Just click “Get login code for” and on the next screen click “Generate” and you’ll finally receive the magical “one-time” code to provide your gadget so that it can automatically do your Facebook login for you automatically.

Copy the code, and then go back to your desktop sidebar and click on the little “wrench” icon to the right of it. When you do that, the window will pop-up for you to enter your super-secret Facebook code.

Enter in the code, and now you’ll never have to do another manual Facebook login in your life.

The gadget displays your profile picture as well as your current status, and small icons and associated values next to them for how many pokes, events, friend requests, inbox messages, notifications, invitations, and group requests!  This is all fine and dandy, but I have one problem with the gadget. You don’t actually receive any realtime information from Facebook, it only provides you with the number of each item, and when you click on the little icon, it opens up a browser and takes you to that specific Facebook page. This is cool – but what if you just want to keep an eye on what your friends are up to without having to open up your browser?

In order to accomplish this task, I went back to Windows Live Gallery and downloaded the other Facebook sidebar gadget called MyFacebook.

Automatic Facebook Login With MyFacebook

When you download and install this sidebar gadget, the first thing you’ll see is the same request for the Facebook code. You’ll need to obtain the code the same way as described above.

Just click on the link and go through the same steps – click “Get Login Code” and then “Generate.” Copy the code and then go back to the gadget and click on the “wrench” icon. You’ll notice that in this case, the form looks just a bit different.

These additional fields are required because this particular gadget has more functionality than the one above. It will automatically provide you with your friends’ latest status updates and picture gallery photos (if you want). I’m not really interested in the albums, but I do want the friend updates. If you only want your “notifications,” but not specific content from your friends’ walls, you need to find the notification feed. Not sure where to find it? Just click on the link above where it says “you can get the feed url from here.”  You’ll be taken to a notifications page. Scroll down and on the right you’ll see “Your Notifications” – click on it.

This will take you to the actual RSS feed page for all of your notifications. All you have to do is copy the URL and paste it into the form on your sidebar gadget.

Now, getting your friend feed is much easier. In the sidebar gadget, just click on “click this link to enable Friends feed,” and then click “Allow Access” on the Facebook page that comes up – it doesn’t get much simpler than that.

The setup is similar to the previous gadget, except now that you have a real-time scrolling update of your friends’ status, the app feels much more interactive and always connected. Now, you can instantly update your own status, or you can just glance to the right and read the status updates of the latest few friends – and you don’t have to set foot inside any browser to do it!

Again – the links to these two apps are MyFacebook (my favorite), or Facebook Sidebar Gadget if that’s what you prefer.

Did you find either of these sidebar gadgets useful? Do you know of any other great social networking Vista sidebar gadgets? Share your insight in the comments section below.

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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This sidebar makes research a breeze. Juice is currently in open-beta and available for free from Linkool Labs.

Juice has proven to be very useful, and has saved me extra open tabs and a lot of time. The Juice algorithm gathers information from multiple sources and aggregates it in a very simple, easy to use interface. For instance, you can just drag and drop “Google” (or any other company’s name) from an article to read the company description on CrunchBase, the latest stock quotations, news articles from major media outlets as well as blogs, images and video.

Plus the amazing thing about this addon is its speed and accuracy. It takes a second at the most for all this information to display – and it is contextually sensitive – which means a search for something like “apple” won’t relay you news about fruits if you’re visiting a tech-related website.

The Juice website explains the ‘magic’ feature:

This engine, comprised of a natural language processing system and a dictionary management system, helps to evolve the semantic web by connecting keywords with the most relevant, rich content from third-party web services.

It’s engine fails gracefully when it can’t find information using its algorithm – to an improved Google search -  with tabs for Images, News, Videos and Blogs. There are no obtrusive ads – a big plus when it comes to these personalized searches.

Here’s Juice’s demo video from YouTube :

When it comes to beta applications, especially these days, with tight release schedules and even more demanding investors, you come to expect crashes and hangs.  Not with Juice which took 2,3MB extra memory and didn’t cause any problems at all. The download itself is small, the download bar stopping at about 500KB.

It’s my job to test different things and write about them, but I don’t often continue using the product regularly.  Like John C. Dvorak said: “99% of everything is crap”. Juice definitely deserves its space on my computer.

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Here are some of the best ones I’ve run into on the web.

1. Page Rank Checker

When it comes right down to it, this may be one of the most important metrics on your blog. While some people say Google Page Rank isn’t as important as it used to be, it still determines how high up Google will generally display your site when it is competing with others on a particular search term. Once your Page Rank grows above level 2 or so (remember each level is logarithmically harder to get to than the last), it isn’t a bad idea to show it off. This is especially useful if your readers don’t have the Google toolbar installed.

If you don’t know what your Page Rank is, you can either get the toolbar, or you can just pop over to PRChecker and submit your site’s URL.

2. Who’s.amung.us

Don’t worry, this is the last “true” chicklet on the list. It’s a very worthy addition though, because it tracks not the number of visits to your site, but instead, the actual number of users on your site at any given time. For instance, if you had a surge of users and had 50 viewing your site simultaneously and then it went back down to 10 users, Who’s.amung.us would give you both the minimum and maximum numbers for the day.

On top of this, it’s not account based, so anyone can view your stats and you can look up the stats of other participating sites. A really original way of thinking about site traffic!

3. TwitStamp

I discovered our second Twitter-related entry when I came across it on Mark’s blog (he’s our managing editor). He has a ton of great widgets on his sidebar (his articles aren’t too shabby either), but this one really stood out to me. It’s a clear summary of your Twitter information and along with your latest update, it includes several of the people you are following as well. There are several configuration options and you can test it out on a dark or light background before copying the code.

4. Retaggr

While Retaggr has a great number of uses, one of their neatest features is a collapsable profile card. When it renders on your page, it will look like a small chicklet that fits in with any others you might have. Upon clicking it, though, it inflates into a complete profile of all your Retaggr information. It even has a little “loading” circle to indicate what’s going on to users. Of course you need to be a Retaggr user already or create a free account, but it’s well worth it for all the different widgets they have available.

My only complaint is that many users might not know to click the widget or what it is at all. You might frame it with a little explanatory text if you are worried about this.

5. Wakoopa

Wakoopa is an interesting little site that we talked about a few weeks ago. I shouldn’t really say little, as it’s a huge database of software and, recently, web apps. If you have a free Wakoopa account, you can get several different widgets that utilize data collected about what software you use most frequently. As a power-user you might very well define yourself by the software you use every single day. This top list probably says more about you than you think.

The widget is relatively attractive and functionally narrow. There aren’t a lot of customization options right now, but I think the information it provides is valuable enough to make up for this.

6. The Classic Blogroll

The last entry on our list isn’t really a widget at all. At least not in the traditional sense. Since time immemorium, blogs have had lists of links to other sites on them called “blogrolls.” I have noticed a marked decrease in the number of blogs using these recently and would like to emphasize how they can be useful to both bloggers and the community at large.

First of all, a blogroll can say a lot about how YOU view the rest of the internet. You can pad the top with a few sites you visit almost every day, then list a few blogs whose owners you are familiar with. Be careful not to overpopulate your blogroll with too many sites though. Otherwise, you might hurt your Page Rank by linking to lesser websites. If you have almost no Page Rank it doesn’t matter so much, but you won’t want anything holding you back in the future.

If you have a good relationship with another blogger, encourage them to swap links with you, that way readers of both your blogs can be shared between you.

Wrap-Up

That’s all for now. There are a MILLION widgets, chicklets, embeds, and other discrete objects you can place on your blog. Be considerate of your users when doing this and try to limit yourself to about two lengths of a standard monitor. Beyond this not only will your widgets get no visibility, but you’re just increasing your load time.

Be sure to share your favorite widgets in the comments and let us know how you use your sidebar.

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I used to use the old Vista sidebar for this task, but that wasn’t nearly as meaty as I had hoped. I tried the sidebar in Google Desktop for a while, but it looked a bit ugly to me . After browsing around for a little bit, I discovered an extremely cool app called Samurize that could make my desktop look freaking amazing while telling me computer stats and many other things.

What is it?

While I myself consider Samurize to be more of a sidebar program than anything else; it’s so flexible that it can take on many different jobs and execute them perfectly. Samurize can do whatever you want it to do. Here is how the makers of Samurize describe their product:

“Samurize is an advanced system monitoring and desktop enhancement engine for Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista. IT professionals, overclockers, gamers and desktop modders alike use Samurize for system information, weather reports, news headlines and much much more. And best of all, Samurize is 100% free!”

That’s probably the best description of the program you’ll find, but once you go to the website and see some example of what you can create, you’ll be blown away and see just what you can do with this program.

Features

As mentioned above, Samurize is a tool that can do many different tasks, but here are a list of things that I’ve used it for so you can get a better idea of how you can customize it to suit yourself.

You can use Samurize to:

• Make your desktop look cooler
• Monitor very precise usage of RAM and CPU
• Get your latest News/Weather/To-Do List updates
• Monitor useless but cool information about your computer usage
• Control your music player
• Lots more

How to use it:

After you download Samurize, you’re going to have to customize it to make it look good. To do this, you can either find a pre-configured package to download or make one yourself. If you feel like making one yourself, you’ll want to head over to the tutorials so you don’t mess anything up. My recommendation is for you to download a pre-configured package that you like, and then configure things using the included ‘Config Editor’. Just right click on the icon after you’ve installed Samurize, and you should see something like this:

Click it to open up the Config Editor.

I know it’s really scary when you first see it, but the concepts are very easy to understand if you’re just doing basic editing. It’s a WYSIWYG editor, so all you need to do is to drag things where you want them and they’ll show up on your desktop at the place you wanted.

To customize things even more, you can install plugins. It’s really a great app that you can customize to your desires. If you need help, you can even go on their IRC and get tips from the pros.

Examples:

Instead of ranting on about how cool Samurize is, I think it would be better if I showed a few examples of the customizations people have created and have you decide on your own. Here are three of my favorite pre-made packages.

Falcone’s Desktop: Download

Glass: Download

Axiom: Download

Dego: Download

Hopefully that should give you guys all an idea of what an awesome program Samurize is. Download it, play around with it, and then post back here. I’d love to hear your thoughts and see your designs. Also, are there any other sidebar programs you use instead of the one provided in Windows Vista?

Post your comments below!

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