BlakeBrannon.com

As you may know I have several peeves about Facebook. Facebook photos still suck in terms of quality and have noticeably gotten worse in terms of server reliability (photos not loading). Another annoyance is that I get emails saying that XYZ did JKL and I have to login to see the text (wall post, etc). Although the photos still suck, RIM has released a Facebook BlackBerry App that helps simplify the Mobile User to Facebook interaction. This and other news tells me that we are winning the battle with Facebook in usability vs. pageviews.

The application works along with the BlackBerry email application. When you receive an email from Facebook, it no longer will show up as an email but is passed to a separate Facebook App to handle. As shown in the screenshot below, I get a seperate icon notification when I receive Facebook emails.

The Facebook email never shows up in your BlackBerry email folder, but It does not remove the message from the server. I guess this can be a good or bad thing, put I would prefer for the App to remove the message from my IMAP account. Along with handing the email notifications you receive about wall posts, messages, pokes, etc the App provides an enhanced way to interact with your Facebook content. When you open the application, you get the following screen showing the latest activity with your account (just related to you) separated by days.

The top bar is your navigation. From left to right you have Status, Upload Photos, Friend List, Invite Friends, Poke, Wall, Messages.

Status

The controversial topic about difficulty of Facebook status updates is now quite simple. You can view and change your current status, similar to TwitterBerry, and view the recent status updates of your friends.

Compare this interface to what TwitterBerry provides.

Photo Uploads

Uploading a photo is actually impressive because you can tag your photos directly from your phone! It is very fast and easy to tag and upload photos.

Friend Finder

Next is the Friend Finder. It is fast and you can easily find a friend if you want to write on their wall, send a message, or poke them. You can also select to view a friends profile, but it just opens it in the web browser which requires a login to Facebook. It would be nice to see more information directly within the app, like email address, phone number, AIM or whatever they have put on their Facebook account. This also is a quick way to find out how to spell someone’s name which can take a while on your mobile phone via mobile.facebook.com because of the searching limitations.

Invite Friends

Next you can invite a friend. Clearly Facebook was working with RIM on this to help build up their membership. The fields are pulled from your BlackBerry’s address book so you can invite someone to join. For me this is completely useless because almost all of my friends already have Facebook accounts.

Poke

Poke Someone. You can select here to poke someone by just typing in their name. A little redundant because you can just use the Friend Finder and select to poke him or her.

Wall Post

Wall Post. Same as Poke, just type a name and write on their wall. Again slightly redundant but saves you one click. It shows you the profile picture of the user’s wall you are about to write on.

Send A Message

Lastly, Send a Message. Again same as Wall Post or Poke, just type a name and you’ll be ready to send that person a message. One nice thing, that is not shown in the photo below, is that is gives you a feed of the corresponding messages between you and your friend.

Conclusion

In summary, the BlackBerry Facebook App is definitely a step in the right direction. It tremendously enhances the interaction a mobile user can have with Facebook and is probably a RIM defense tactic for the very popular iphone.facebook.com. It would be nice to see a user’s profile and content without switching to the BlackBerry web browser. Bring in a user’s wall posts, photos, and other public content directly to the app.

Anyone else installed an used the BlackBerry Facebook App? What are you opinions?