While Facebook has already released their Facebook for Adobe Air application, Adobe recently released their own desktop Facebook application called “Photo Uploader”. The new desktop application lets you perform a large number of Facebook activities including reading your stream, posting comments and updates, viewing your friends, and more. While there are a number of desktop tools for managing your Facebook account, this is probably the best one I’ve seen so far. While there are some minor bugs to hash out, this application definitely has a lot of potential.

One additional feature is the ability to upload photos simply by dragging them over a running version of the application. While I still prefer to load up Facebook within the browser, there are many people that have a preference for running desktop applications. As Erick Schonfeld wrote the other day though, none of these applications do anything to resolve the noise issue. It’s great that I can follow and friend people around the web, however finding the most relevant information to me still isn’t possible.

There are a few people attempting to resolve the problem through new forms of search algorithms. While I think search is a legitimate approach, I want a system that does automated filtering for me. Yes, it’s easy to theorize about a solution, but developing one is much more complex. That’s not to say nobody is working on a solution. Philtro, a D.C. metro based startup, is working on their own solution to the problem. By letting users take advantage of the “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” rating system previously used by Facebook, the company hopes to develop an increasingly relevant stream for users.

We’re still at the early phases of developing new discovery mechanisms to easily sift through the overwhelming amount of content being produced by our friends and other contacts. For now, users have a diverse set of tools to choose from to interact with their personal streams, including the Facebook stream. As of a week ago, you can add the Photo Uploader for Facebook application to that mix. Do you prefer to interact with Facebook from the website or from desktop applications? Do you think the Photo Uploader application is better than other desktop applications you’ve used in the past?