Signs That Say Nothing: No: 3

More curious sign antics seen at my local railway station..

Fosta might know this one.

The new homescreen for Facebook application on iPhone.

Facebook v 3.0 was released for iPhone today and this update may actually get me using Facebook again.

From my point of view the best part of the update is the fact that the photo upload and management tools are as good as something like Shozu.

This makes it oh so easy to get pictures to your friends, browse, tag etc. It also enables uploading of video if you happen to don an iPhone 3gs about your person – that said, it’ll take a lot to break my love affair with Flickr.

With the new app it’s also much easier to move through friends pages, search for people and all that social lovliness. Just browsing through my list of friends now, I can see it’s easier to stay informed with what folks are up to. It’s the kind of snacky interaction that works well when you are waiting for a train or a bus and you can’t be bothered with your RSS feeds.

As an aside – This reminds me, I really must go on a Facebook friend cull, as I have no idea why I’m connected to some people as we haven’t spoken in 20 years and yet they can see pictures of my kids.

Infact, I don’t think I’ve ever properly engaged with Facebook since I joined because like everyone else I went on a friend gold rush in the beginning , collecting all those people I knew but don’t really know. It’s kinda stopped me really playing with it (aside from the fact all my other feeds are wired up to it giving the impression that I’m there lots).

If you get my meaning.

Back in the room.

While the Facebook update is a good one (they’ve also added a decent phonebooky type thing and events, popup notifications and the ability to ‘like’ items), I always start to worry when sites port their web based featureset to mobile.

This is largely because you have to design for a different mode of use (small screen, out and about, poor connectivity etc) and that you should only bother with the most mobile utility aspects of you offering.

I always cite MySpace Mobile as an example of failure to this regard because it appeared that they didn’t really think about the parts of their site that were best suited to mobile. They chunked the while thing over.

I haven’t looked at it in so long it may have changed. I certainly don’t feel it’s presence in the iPhone AppStore.

The good news for Facebook is that it has lots of mobile utility and this app has clearly been designed ground up from this point of view.

The notifications part is nicely done. If you are browsing someone’s photos and one of your friends pings you a comment or wall pot,the new app alerts you. Enables you to view and deal with it and then come back to what you were doing. So many iPhone apps disturb your workflow and reset you on stuff like this, so nicely done.

Sadly though, no privacy settings management which I would like to have seen.

the bottom line is mobile apps have to be useful else they just enjoy a bit of vanity usage and fade to grey.

They have to be useful.
They have to be useful.

So yay there. FB 3.0 is useful.