Macgasm

Facebook and Twitter have become necessary evils of the 21st century. If I don’t check my Twitter feed and FB updates more than 16,453 times a day, I feel hollow inside. It’s a disease, it’s wonderful, it’s awful and it allows our parents to pry like never before.

So when I bought my iPod Touch, the fist app I loaded was Facebook – The second was the iBeer app, but that’s a story for another happy hour. The first Facebook app was a nice stripped-down version of my FB page. I could update my status, see what comments that update yielded and even chat with online friends. Eventually, however, I wanted to view my photos without waiting 26 hours for them to load, make them my profile picture and tag the idiots who ended up in the photo with me.

THESE ARE VERY IMPORTANT PARTS OF MY DAY.

BAM! My desires are fulfilled! With the release of the Facebook 3.0 for iPod and iPhone, you can now tag your photos, add them to your page and replace your profile photo at will. You can also see your friends’ birthdays, view calendar events and write “notes” to post to your profile. The new software features a menu page to access all this, and it took me a second to find, but once I realized the grid icon in the upper left hand corner meant something, I was all set. There is also a “notifications” bar at the bottom of the menu, so you can now know the second a friend challenges you to a useless movie quiz. Handy.

Your profile page in 3.0 is filled with less clutter, featuring an easier interface by moving the tabs for “wall”, “info” and “photos” to a menu bar at the bottom of the page. The status bar now allows you upload pictures right from your photo library. Status updates with urls can be viewed in Facebook’s own integrated web browser, which is pretty cool – Used to be you’d open links in Safari, but have to quit and reopen FB to get back to your profile – SOOO much extra work that none of us have time for, obviously.

My favorite part of the FB 3.0 is the landscape mode. EVERY app for the iPod/iPhone should allow for landscape viewing/typing. Typing on Apple’s mini keyboard in a SOBER state was near impossible until the advent of landscape mode. Now I can drunk text, drunk FB and drunk Tweet all my sleeping homies with ease. Works well when I’m sober, too.

My biggest gripes about the new 3.0 software are:

• The load time seems a bit slow. Anything that takes more then three seconds to pop onto my screen is worthless to me.

• The chat feature now list your available friends in alphabetical order. I liked it better when they were listed by my ‘active’ friends and ’sleeping’ friends, but that’s just me. Plus, the alphabet has never been my strong suit.

• There’s no place that dispenses free money. This is pretty much a universal complaint I have for all Apple apps.

That’s my short and sweet review of Facebook’s free 3.0 update for the Apple iPhone/iPod Touch. I’m sure there’s a whole bunch of cool “developer” crap that I didn’t talk about, but I’m a tech idiot, so I’d just be making stuff up to sound smart.

See you on Facebook! Don’t send me quizzes, or I’ll send you dead animals in the mail!

You can be Corey’s FB friend here: Fakerockstar Pandolph

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