Mark Hendrickson of TechCrunch posted glowing impressions yesterday of the Facebook iPhone app, declaring it “indispensable within the next few months.”
Why is it so compelling? Because it almost eliminates the need to maintain a separate contacts list on my phone. While Facebook’s web app for the iPhone was cool enough, the native app basically transforms Facebook into a mobile directory with rich information about your friends.
If you’re even semi-serious about using Facebook to keep track of your friends, you may never have to click the “Phone” icon to dial them up. Just hit the Facebook icon and move over to the “Friends” tab. You’ll see all of your Facebook friends laid out, and when you click on their names, their contact info appears in the iPhone’s customary user interface.
That’s all well and good, but Facebook forgot to add something to its iPhone application: the actual Facebook experience. It’s completely perplexing why Facebook went the route that it did. It added almost all of the Facebook communications services – “almost” because it’s without walls (figure that one out) – so you’re basically left with a glorified contacts list. The iPhone Facebook App lets you do the following
- Update your status and view your friends’ statuses
- View your profile and your friends’ profiles which includes only your e-mail, phone number, networks, jobs, birthdays, relationships status and mini-feed
- Facebook chat
- Private messaging
Want to write on a friend’s wall? No can do, guess you’ll have to jump to Safari and load up the Facebook Web App (click this link to play with the iPhone Optimized site). In fact, the iPhone Web optimized version of Facebook is everything the iPhone Facebook App should have been.
Meanwhile, MySpace – and I can’t believe I’m about to say this – absolutely demolishes Facebook’s iPhone App. Just check out the video below:
Mark’s love affair with the iPhone Facebook App is a Silicon Valley disease. Everyone there is ready to hail almost anything from the beloved Facebook and Twitter as incredible, and slow to criticize. Unless Facebook updates the App to work more like its iPhone optimized site then the company has completely dropped the ball on this one.
Sure it’s nice that you can Facebook chat (even though I never use it even on the regular Facebook), though when I’m on my phone – like most people outside of the Valley, I suppose – I use SMS to reach people. It’s instant and they don’t have to be logged into Facebook to see my message. So could someone please explain how Facebook chat is a superior mode of communication? Sure it saves texts but I have unlimited data, so it’s far more convenient for me to receive an SMS than login to Facebook. And if I were to login to an application to chat, it would be AIM anyway.
I love TechCrunch, and I love a lot of the Web 2.0 technologies, but I thank God I live in NYC so I can see these things from a better perspective. The world doesn’t run on Web 2.0 tech yet and the truth as I see it is that most of the Web 2.0 tech that is written about with such masturbatory glee won’t make much of a difference to the mass market.
That being said, I do see the opportunity for Twitter to explode. Once you have a Twitter desktop app, it’s addicting to just see what your friends are up to.
