Social media can be a time-suck.

You’re working away on a report, then the urge hits to check Facebook or Twitter. You minimize your work window, then next thing you know, two hours have passed and you’ve liked 25 photos and favorited 12 tweets – but made no progress on your presentation.

That’s where TapSocial comes in.

TapSocial, free if you don’t mind ads; $5 for ad-free, consolidates your Facebook and Twitter feeds into a live-updating stock ticker at the bottom of your screen.

It keeps your social media active but out of the way while you’re working. Pretty useful.

The best part: you can completely work the app your way, scrolling through tweets, adjusting the look of the ticker stream, and setting the app to launch automatically at startup. You can stream selected lists and hash tags, reply to tweets, and of course write new tweets.

It works on both Mac and Windows.

Check out this video to see how the app works, live in action:

Download TapSocial here.