fTalk

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on December 19, 2011

Not everyone is on Facebook, but it sure seems that way sometimes; the site certainly has more members than any other social networking site in history. Among Facebook's many options for staying connected is its chat feature, which is popular with many users. But what if you want to chat with Facebook friends without being tethered to the Facebook Web page? Try fTalk. This slick chat client lets you log into your Facebook account and chat with your friends without even having your browser open.

We got off to a rough start with fTalk, as it immediately crashed the first time we launched it. But after we restarted it we encountered no further problems. The program has a sleek interface that's typical of chat clients, with separate collapsible lists of friends who are on- and offline; a search feature lets you find friends quickly if your lists are long. Initiating a chat with a friend opened an attractive window that displayed both our profile images, as well as links to open Facebook in our browser and view our friend's profile and photos or send him a private message. Options allowed us to enable or disable sounds and tray notifications when we got new messages or when a friend signed into chat. We didn't come across a Help file anywhere, but that was okay; anyone who's ever used a chat client before (and even most people who haven't) should be able to figure out fTalk pretty easily. Overall, we found fTalk to be a great alternative to chatting on the Facebook Web page, and we recommend it to anyone who makes frequent use of Facebook's chat feature.

fTalk installs and uninstalls without issues.