A few weeks ago we told you about TiPb’s shiny new Facebook group — a comfy place to de-harshen your mellow and hang with your fellow TiPbsters (TiPbites? Er… we’ll work on that!) on the FB!
Well, we got us some feedback. You wanted some features. You wanted to be able to keep up with news, for example, which is something not easily accomplished in the confines of a “group”. We shoulda made a “page”, you told us (most of us, at least — Chad bashed us over the head with that one about 0.01 seconds in).
Well, we listened. Introducing The iPhone blog’s brand spanking new Facebook Page!
And to celebrate both the launch of our iPhone Live!-Cast and the new page, anyone who becomes a fan of the TiPb’s Facebook Page this week gets one (1) entry into our new contest: the Ultimate iPhone Accessory Pack Give Away (details coming soon!)
So what are you waiting for? Phase 2 has begun!
Now that Facebook has their snazzy new 2.0 iPhone App, TiPb decided we needed a snazzy new Facebook group to go with it. We’re launching it today, so here’s your one and only chance to get in on the ground floor.
So what are you waiting for? Head on over to Facebook and become a founding member of the iPhone blog group now!
(And don’t forget, you can follow us on the Twitter as well!)
Last month, Dieter let us know that Facebook’s popular, but feature-thin App Store application would be getting an update to (hopefully!) bring it up to par with the older WebApp version accessible via MobileSafari browsing. The due date was September, and boy did they just manage to sneak it in under the wire! Check out the iTunes App Store for Facebook 2.0 (still free!).
So what’s in the Facebook 2.0 update?
- Notifications
- Full news feed
- News feed story comments
- People search
- Friend requests
- Photo tagging
- Photo captioning
- Photo posts to friends’ walls
- Full mini-feed combined with the wall
- Entire inbox, including sent and updates
- Inbox search
- Message attachments
- Speed and stability improvements
Impressions so far? The extra content accessibility is awesome. The UI changes are interesting, especially the horizontally scrolling menu bar under Home, but the visualization of it seems more than a little strange. What do you think? Is it as good as the WebApp yet? As the Facebook website? Has it changed your experience of the social monster? Let us know!
(Thanks to Gregory for sending this in!)
Good news on the Facebook front: their native application is due to get an upgrade in September. The upgrade should actually make the app reach some sort of feature parity with the web-app version of Facebook, which right now is far superior to the native app.
New features include a revamped profiles view, viewing all notifications in the home tab, friend search and approval, the ability to view your full inbox, and more.
Joy!
Read: for iPhone’s Notes
iPhone users sure love them some Facebook. In just two weeks following the launch of Apple’s App Store, Facebook’s Director of Mobile, Jed Stremel announced that the Facebook App for iPhone has been downloaded over 1,000,000 times. Whether those are unique downloads, and whether all downloaders are now using it consistently aren’t known, but Facebook remains in the top-ten list for free apps and doesn’t look to be going anywhere anytime soon.
In fact, last week at Facebook’s f8 conference they announced Facebook Connect, a new framework that would grant other iPhone apps (and their developers) the ability to log onto and use your Facebook account data. Depending on your views about convenience vs. security/privacy, this means you will either enjoy a single and consistent presence across a wider range of apps (one account to rule them all), or be even more paranoid about your personal information getting out of your control (one point of failure to leak it all).
Personally, I have a Facebook account but only visit it when I get an alert or need some info. I have the iPhone app, but like the WebApp before it, find MobileSafari a good enough browser I’ll most often to just go straight to “just the internet” version. And while I’m all for “open social”-esque removal of walled gardens, I think it’s promoting a cavalier attitude towards privacy, and try to remind myself that you can never un-release information.
What about you? Do you use Facebook? Do you use the Facebook iPhone app? What do you think about the idea of Connect?
Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook, gave a great talk today. His talk actually dovetails perfectly with what I wrote last night, that all of these “walled garden” methodologies have got to go. My notes from the talk have been posted up; you’ll see them refined into a story at BerryShack and Crackberry soon enough, I’m sure.
I’ll dig a bit deeper into his talk later today, but the highlight for me is that Moskovitz knows that as computers get smaller, they’ll eat into mobiles. Mobiles will have to become open like computers, or people will start using computers instead of mobiles. As computers miniaturize, that’s just going to be a fact of life.
figure 1: this image from Moskovitz’s talk shows the nature of the computer world versus the nature of the mobile world. In the mobile world, everything is locked. Carriers try to monetize various kinds of data over their own network, the OS is locked to everyone, and the hardware is similarly locked, which isn’t what people really want (witness the energy put into hacking openness into the iPhone). The locked-in aspect of the mobile world is also what leads to people thinking of their mobile phone as jsut a landline that they can take with them wherever they go, instead of a mobile computing device. This is a barrier to smartphone adoption.
figure 2: this is Moskovitz’s picture that depicts the collision that’s going to occur in the mobile world as the computer world miniaturizes to the point where the computer hardware makers can put their software and services onto mobile-sized devices that have full computer power.
The other great part is that Moskovitz gave a warning to everyone attending: open up your platform or become obsolete, either by Apple’s hand or Google’s hand. Pick your poison, really. Both of them are looking to either destroy or warp the industry, and to do it from within.
