Push Notifications Come To Facebook’s iPhone App -- Finally!
Posted 01/06/2010 at 3:40pm
| by J.R. Bookwalter
Facebook cultists were no doubt overjoyed when the 3.0 version of their iPhone app was updated awhile back, but one major oversight in that otherwise excellent release has finally been rectified with today’s 3.1 update.
We speak, of course, of push notifications -- now you’ll know lickety-split when friends, family, lovers or even one of those total strangers you decided to add as a friend sends you a message, writes on your wall, tags you in a photo or sends you a comment or event invitation. You can even get pushed for new friend requests or confirmations, too.
Of course, that’s not all that Facebook 3.1 for iPhone has to offer. You can now sync your Facebook friends with your device’s address book, including replacing contact photos with the ones updated at the main hive.
With so many push-enabled apps blanketing Apple’s App Store, the most curious question is, what took so long? Developer Joe Hewitt famously announced back in mid-November that he was leaving the Facebook iPhone app project out of frustration with Apple’s app approval process. Did it really need to take nearly another two months to push out a push notification-enabled update? (Pun intended.)
At any rate, not
everyone will be happy with the news -- no doubt that developers of such apps as
Boxcar (which has offered Facebook push notifications for awhile now) might tear up just a little tonight.
As always, the update is absolutely free and
can be downloaded right now from your iPhone or iPod touch or on the desktop via iTunes. As usual, it requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later -- and bunch of Facebook friends wouldn’t hurt, either.