Trumblog

With Facebook being the dominant social network and mobile social media usage increasing exponentially a BlackBerry application is crucial to provide access to the network and support updating.  Facebook has had a rudimentary application for awhile, but version 1.7 that was rolled out this summer evolved the app from providing the most basic access to real time updates and integration with the BlackBerry.

The application sports  a top navigation of icons for the primary activities of the site:

• News Feed
• Notifications
• Upload a Photo
• Friends
• Add A Friend
• Write on a Wall
• Send a Message

Reading your News Feed and updating your own status update are the most popular activities on the social network and the application supports these two activities well.  The Status Update field works just like the website, though it does not include features to post links, photos, etc nor does it support @ tagging of friends in your status updates.  The feed can be filtered to display the full news feed, just status updates, photos or links. This filtering is especially handy due to the limited real estate of a smart phone screen and was a feature that had not yet been rolled out for all Facebook profiles at the time of the application’s launch.  As of yet the new security features for status updates have also not yet been rolled into the mobile application.

Easy access to notifications about comments and messages on your profile are available from the Notifications screen and the Upload a Photo screen does exactly what you expect, but allows you to enter a caption, select an album to place the photo into and even tag the photo.

The Friends screen gives you a list of all your Facebook friends and then the features to interact with them and their profiles:

• view a friend’s profile,
• send them a message,
• writing on a friend’s wall,
• poking a friend, and
• requesting their phone number.

For those of us with a large number of friends and who use Friend Lists, addition of this feature for filtering would be a very useful addition to the application.  Friend profiles are pretty robust in the Facebook BlackBerry application.  It displays your friend’s full news freed, gives you all of the features above and access to their photos and albums.  Interestingly the album and photo browsing uses a slightly different and slightly cooler interface that is not as menu driven as the rest of the app.  It works nicely and I wish that it was used more, though perhaps if they were usability issues would be more apparent.

The Add a Friend screen gives you the basic ability to invite a friend via the mobile application with an email address and you can add a message as well. The Write on a Wall screen is similarly basic allowing you to post text, but nothing more to the profile of any of your friends.

Also a little disappointing is the Send a Message screen.  The screen is not named InBox or Messages for a reason.  This screen is just for sending.  You cannot access your Facebook Inbox or received messages from the BlackBerry application, a missing feature that I find more and more necessary the more my network uses Facebook email rather than standard email addresses to communicate.

While all of these features are accessible from the application itself this is a BlackBerry native app and therefore it is fully integrated with the BlackBerry experience in other applications. I can make calls to friends from the application.  I can post photos to Facebook from the Camera application.  I can set my options to have notifications and messages from Facebook appear with my BlackBerry messages.  Your BlackBerry calendar and contacts can also be connected, but alas due to BES issues I cannot do this.

With the increasing merger of social media and mobile I suspect that many of the features that I miss such as full Facebook email support, friend lists, status update privacy management and @friend tagging support will all be added to the application in the near future.  These will be necessary for power users and that audience is growing daily.

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