Facebook iPhone app Updated with Push and Sync

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

facebook version 3.1

The Facebook app for the iPhone got a major update today to version 3.1, which is proving to be a major headache for some, while others are cheering it’s long awaited arrival. Facebook 3.1 arrived in the app store and crackbook addicts jumped on it to see how it could feed their need for friends and networking. Unfortunately it seems that the app has some strange quirks to it so make sure you know what you are doing before you update wholeheartedly.

This update first of all allows you to sync your Facebook contacts with your contacts on your iPhone. For those who have put alot of effort into placing the perfect photo with each contact, DO NOT USE the Facebook sync as it will replace those with your Facebook’s friend photo! This seems a bit extreme. Now you are going to have your friends’ kids as your phone contact photo, since so many people seem to use their kids as their Facebook profile picture. So while this concept seems good in theory, it is not so good in practice. I would rather determine what photos are used as contact photos, rather than having my friend’s Facebook profile pic slapped up there. You can edit them back to what they were but in some cases I am hearing that those photos were one offs and they had not saved them anywhere else. Restore may work. Unfortunately there does not appear to be anywhere you can change the settings to save some photos and nuke the others. Hopefully there will be some refinements offered soon. There are also reports that it is misidentifying people and not allowing you to comment on photos, etc. Needless to say, it needs work!

As far as the push notifications are concerned, this feature lets you know on your phone whenever you get a comment from a friend or when another friend comments on something you commented on. The push notifications seem a little redundant given you could already get email notifications of such events, but the more the better for some it seems. The notifications are silent however, and whether they are meant to be silent or not is anyone’s guess. Perhaps this is another bug?

So generally speaking this update seems to be a bit of a dud. Calls are already going out for 3.2 to fix some of the quirks in this latest update. Facebook is already on some people’s bad list for mucking about with their privacy. They dropped the ball on this update and this is going to generate even more bad press.

This is an article by The Apps Machine.