Facebook 3.0 faces iPhone: all poke but no push

David Swan
Wednesday, 02 September 2009 16:51

Your IT - Entertainment

Facebook 3.0 is the latest version of the iPhone application from the immensely popular social networking site, and is now available from the Apple iTunes App Store. What's in it, and more importantly, what's missing?

Facebook needs no introduction, it's the bane of officice supervisors everywhere and now has over 250 million users, or about 4 percent of the world's population. Facebook 3.0 for iPhone/iPod touch adds a myriad of new features and enhancements including landscape mode, the ability to see upcoming events and RSVP to them, view upcoming friends' birthdays, view 'pages' and post updates and photos to pages you administer, and write notes as well as read the notes of friends.

Notably absent from the new update is push notification, which was introduced in the iPhone 3.0 Software Update but isn't yet available in the latest Facebook application update. Push notification allows applications to listen for messages being 'pushed' to them from the application's server, even when the applications themselves aren't open.

Other features new to the 3.0 update include the ability to upload video directly from the iPhone 3GS. Users can also upload and manage photo albums, including creating and deleting albums and photos, along with managing tags and changing their profile pictures.

iPhone and iPod users can now zoom in on photos, like photos and posts, see the same news feed as the Facebook website and visit links in a built-in browser.

One thing I'm looking forward to in a future release is hopefully some sort of verification system whenever a user uploads a video/photo or posts a status update. Posting fake status updates using the iPhones of others is already prevalent. On a personal note, many of my friends have been falsely 'outed' or admitted to heinous allegations courtesy of their caring friends, and it remains to be seen if the ability to directly upload video and photos from the iPhone will cause similar, if not more harmful, consequences.

As far as I can see, 3.0 doesn't feature any such privacy feature, and will therefore allow any video to be uploaded to the world directly from an unsuspecting iPhone. This feature is of course not entirely new, users have been able to upload footage to Youtube from their mobiles for a long time now, but Facebook offers a whole new realm of privacy and cyberbullying traps, given the way in which it notifies all of a user's friends about new photos or video that have been uploaded.

Phones are particularly easy to get a hold of, and it would be nice to see at least an optional feature from Facebook in order to protect their users' privacy.

Facebook 3.0 is available for free from the iTunes Store for iPhone and iPod touch and requires the iPhone 3.0 Software Update.