Social Lite for Windows

Social networking can take up both a lot of your time and a lot of real estate on your computer screen, so it's no wonder that there are now clients that let users handle multiple social networking accounts all in one place. Social Lite is a basic program that lets you access Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail, and provides balloon notifications for new posts or messages. It's not bad, but with such stiff competition among social networking clients, it definitely has room for improvement.

The program functions much like a browser, with icons across the top for Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail that allowed us to switch between accounts as we would with browser tabs. We had no trouble configuring our accounts, although we did find it kind of annoying that the program took us to our Google account instead of directly to our Gmail. You should be aware that although Social Pro can support multiple accounts of each type, this free version allows only one Facebook, one Twitter, and one Gmail account. With each update--a new Facebook status update or message, new tweet, or new e-mail--the program played a pleasant chiming sound and displayed a pop-up window with a preview. We did find it odd, however, that we had to manually refresh each account in order to view the new content. The program has a small set of options--you can select whether you want the preview balloon to be displayed or the chime to be played--but there's not much in the way of customization and there's no Help file or other documentation. Overall, Social Lite worked, but it's not nearly as sophisticated as some similar programs we've seen. It's worth checking out, but most people will probably find better alternatives.

Social Lite installs and uninstalls without issues.