First Look: Facebook for iPhone

One of the very first web-based applications released for the iPhone last year was the Facebook application, which more or less took the Facebook.com website and stripped it down to the basics so iPhone users could take advantage of the social networking site’s most fundamental features on their three-inch screen (see our interview with Facebook’s Joe Hewitt in the December 2007 issue of iProng Magazine). Now Facebook has raised the stakes by releasing an App Store-based version of its iPhone app, which on first blush feels like the original web app on steroids.



Facebook’s most important mobile functionality, the status update, is front and center – along with a camera button which allows you to use the iPhone’s camera functionality from within the Facebook app in order to take photos and upload them to your Facebook page by tapping just a couple of buttons.



Along the bottom of the screen are icons to take you to the Facebook home page, along with your Profile, Friends, Chat, and Inbox. That last feature might be the only source of consternation among users, at least initially. When Facebook finally relented and allowed us to view our Facebook messages via email without having to log in and read them on their site, many of us simply allowed the messages to pile up as “unread” because we’d already read them via email. So while the Facebook app’s desktop icon tries to be helpful by displaying the number of unread messages with the same red and white numerical ellipse as the iPhone’s built-in application…well let’s just say that mine says I have 283 new messages. So some of us are in for a tedious “mark messages as read” session on the real Facebook website (where you can process twenty at a time) before that particular “feature” becomes useful.



That one-time annoyance aside, iPhone users who’ve liked using Facebook’s web app should love this app – and it’s a free download.