There was no mention of it at the F8. Apple didn't bring out a surprise guest in Mark Zuckerburg at its iPhone conference last week. Where was the much anticipated and now long overdue Facebook app for iPad that the world has been waiting for?
Well, on Monday afternoon, the app quietly arrived via a post from Facebook's own page on, you guessed it, Facebook.
It's main integration is for the iPad, previously incompatible with the Facebook mobile app for iPhone, but it also serves as an upgrade for iPhone users. It is said that this app will also work across Android and other mobile platforms soon.
So, I took this app for a test drive last night on my iPad, and I have continued using it this morning. At first, I did not see the point of going to this app over my web page. The functionality seemed, if anything, scaled back from the web experience. After some more time with the app, I found that it was a better over all experience for iPad Facebook-ing.
The key difference for a user standpoint is that everything can be run through the app. If you click on an article, for example, you will be taken to the site that the article is on, but it is still framed within the Facebook borders. This will change the game for developers. Instead of creating apps that rest on your mobile device, you will now see more apps that are ingredients into Facebook's app experience.
The new app provides great new features, including optimized photo viewing, and as mentioned above, never having to leave the app itself to visit different sites.
That said, there are a few functionality changes that Facebook must make right now:
1) Sharing a link. The web experience lets you post a link and recognizes that you are doing so by including the article title, choosing a thumbnail or embedding the video. On the app, the link shows up raw and looks like a user error when posted.
2) Back button or History. One of the cool new features is that you can simply slide the screen from left to right and it will take you back to the page you were on before. Unfortunately, this does now work the other way around. Clicking through to an article on a different site, still within the Facebook app framework, you can easily lose where you were on that site if you, say, accidentally flipped the screen back with your finger. I mean, you can find it again, like I had to this morning, it was just a pain to retrace my steps.
3) Pages filters. On a 'fan' page, there is no filter to only read what the Page administrator has posted vs what everyone has posted. This was a distracting and annoying experience. You'll quickly see how much spam and nonsense other people post on your fan pages without this feature.
4) Video chat. Through the message function, which is slick and very useable, I was surprised that I could not video chat. This would be a huge step for Facebook in the mobile space, especially considering their recent partnership with Skype.
The new app will need some improvements, and more will likely bubble up the more people use it, but over all, the experience is quite good. I will be interested to see how the new web features, including Timeline, will integrate into the Facebook app moving forward. ~p
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