Like many of us, I have a Facebook account. Like many of us, I often forget to actually go in and check it, read my notifications and keep up with what's happening in my social circle... arguably the whole point of the exercise! One of the biggest reasons for this is that - unlike Twitter - I don't keep Facebook 'in view' during my working day. You could argue that this is a positive benefit because it means less distraction, but it's primarily because despite playing with other desktop based Facebook apps (such as Tweetdeck), I haven't found a way to do so yet that works for me. Enter Facebook's desktop notifications app for Mac.

The new application, developed by Facebook themselves, adds an icon to your Mac's menu bar that provides quick access to your news feed, profile page and status update page (which is also accessible via a keyboard shortcut) as well as listing your outstanding notifications and inbox contents.

It's quick, easy to use and best of all light on resources! It sits there unintrusively in your menu bar, providing Growl (aka toaster) notifications as new events occur. For me it's a keeper... I might just start using Facebook regularly now...!

[via TechCrunch]

Postbox - the e-mail application for Windows and Mac OS that we first mentioned back in February has exited it's long Beta period and reached a 1.0 release.

Postbox pitches itself as being 'smarter than your average e-mail client'. Built on a Mozilla core, the application works behind the scenes to catalog everything in your mail. Text, contacts, addresses, links, pictures, attachments - all of them are indexed, providing a very powerful search experience and a useful e-mail view that abstracts potentially interesting content from the body of the e-mail itself.

If, like me, you use GMail, you will have become accustomed to the conversation based message view and this is a perspective that Postbox retains, making migration from the web interface to the Postbox application a painless process. Postbox is compatible with a wide range of e-mail services (Gmail via IMAP and POP3, MobileMe, AOL Mail, Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail Plus as well as any generic IMAP or POP3 account) and includes excellent integration with the most popular services. One such example is the integration between Postbox's powerful 'To Do' flagging function and GMail's own 'Star' system.

The feature list is really too extensive to list here, but includes RSS support, Newsgroups support, Facebook / Friendfeed / Twitter integration, emoticons, draft auto-saving, password protection, spam filtering, return receipts, add-ons and much more.

Postbox retails for $39.95 with discounts available for 'Family Pack' purchases. A 'Lifetime Upgrade' option is also available.

By far the best way to experience Postbox's powerful search facility and unique content abstraction is by trying it - and thankfully a free trial is available from the Postbox site.

The only question is... is there still a place for desktop e-mail clients in today's online e-mail environment?

The Video Issue. In this issue we cover:

• Google Demo Reel
• Google Click Fraud: The Movie
• The Secret of Google's Search Engine
• Google's First TV ad
• Vint Cerf on Net Neutrality
• Google is looking for a Chef in Chelsea
• What News sources does Google index?
• Picasa Web Albums
• Gpokr