Category: Technology Author : Duncan Riley Posted: July 11, 2008
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iPhone Facebook App, enough to bring first adopters back?

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Somewhere along the line this year I fell out of love with Facebook. FB Apps appeared like spam, Poker was still better on Pokerstars, zombies became so yesterday, and I stopped using it. It was only when I completely missed an event (sorry MODM ppl) that I jumped back on briefly to update things, blindly accepting friend requests without knowing who half the people were.

Today I got my hands on the new iPhone 3G and the Facebook app was there to be downloaded for free, so I did.

It’s good. Really, really good, and superior to the old iPhone web version of Facebook in many ways.

The big things that Facebook are pushing is Facebook Chat and Facebook email. I keep forgetting Facebook has email, and I wish other people would as well, as I have 235 unread messages at a rate of 2-3 per day. Chat on the other hand is different. I hate it on the site, annoyingly popping up when I get on. But on the iPhone, chat is appealing, in a separate tab, really easy to use, but easy enough to ignore as well.

Chat itself is only as good as the people using it, but with a lack of other chat applications available (AIM excepted…and I don’t have an AIM id), Facebook becomes a handy mobile chat platform.

Friends contact details are also offered via the app, so looking up email addresses and phone numbers becomes very nice indeed.

I’m unlikely to start spending copious amounts of time on Facebook again, but in offering a smart application such as this, Facebook may once again find favor in a first adopter crowd that has in many cases moved on to spending the bulk on their time on newer and shinier things.

Profy also has more here.



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  • July 11, 2008 at 5:03 am Kevin Hessel
    I really just don't understand the universal high praise for this app. We completely lost wall-to-wall access, event access and photo album access of our friends, along with sitewide searchability of people who are not our friends (native app only searches people in your contacts). The native app also severely parsed mini-feeds and friend profiles. Adding photos is a wash -- it wasn't that tough to e-mail photos through the stock Camera app. And mail through Facebook is NOT a new feature with the native app -- it's in the Web app. We traded all this for chat, and folks are reviewing it like it's 2.0's killer app. Stop it. It's not really, really good. It's not superior to the old Web version in any discernible way outside chat.

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