It’s been a big day for Facebook, with news earlier this morning that the social network will soon be totally revamping its privacy settings and making it easier to share with the entire web. Now developer Joe Hewitt, who is responsible for Facebook’s massively popular iPhone application, has posted a note to the site describing some of the new features we can expect from the latest iteration of the app, which he says is “98% done”. Hewitt doesn’t give an exact release date, but we can likely expect it very soon.
From Hewitt’s post:
1. The “new” News Feed
2. Like
3. Events (including the ability to RSVP)
4. Notes
5. Pages
6. Create new photo albums
7. Upload photos to any album
8. Zoom into photos
9. Easier photo tagging
10. Profile Pictures albums
11. A new home screen for easy access to all your stuff, search, and notifications
12. Add your favorite profiles and pages to the home screen
13. Better Notifications (they link to the comments so you can reply)
14. Quickly call or text people right from the Friends page
15. Messages you are typing will be restored if you quit or are interrupted by a phone call
All of these will be welcome additions, particularly the ability to view and respond to events listings, which were oddly missing in the iPhone Facebook app until now (I routinely found myself having to access the web version of the site in order to look up details). Unfortunately, Hewitt writes that Push notifications, which Apple enabled with the release of the iPhone 3.0 update, will not make it into this release — we’ll have to wait for the next point update later this summer.
Update: Hewitt has provided us with some screenshots of the upcoming app. Looks like a big improvement.
