Even better than Push Notifications is the ability to downwardly sync your Facebook Friends with your Address Book, including Profile Photos. If you have it set up, that then syncs to Google too!
Huh. This is actually the first app I've used that writes to the address book instead of just reading. I didn't even know the API supported that.
Which, not to veer too far off topic, makes more glaring the continuing omission of a calendar API from the iPhone. Doesn't adding contacts from a third-party app seem like a less common use case than adding calendar events? The Facebook app could certainly take advantage of it.
Besides push being neat, I especially like the ability to synchronize the pictures of your contacts. I honestly never bother to get a good picture and add it manually :)
The contact sync feature has an option to replace your existing photos in your contacts and is disabled by default.
Unfortunately, it seems to have gone ahead and replaced many of the photos I have set for contacts. It hasn't done it for all of them but it has for many of them. I'm not sure about all the details of the bug but be aware that it's likely your pictures will be replaced whether you want them to or not.
You also may have to sync a couple times before photos are synced to all the relevant contacts. Their photo download protocol looks pretty chatty and I guess some of the requests fail and they aren't re-trying until the next sync session.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 28.3 ms ] threadVery solid release - even without Hewitt as the developer.
Which, not to veer too far off topic, makes more glaring the continuing omission of a calendar API from the iPhone. Doesn't adding contacts from a third-party app seem like a less common use case than adding calendar events? The Facebook app could certainly take advantage of it.
The contact sync feature has an option to replace your existing photos in your contacts and is disabled by default.
Unfortunately, it seems to have gone ahead and replaced many of the photos I have set for contacts. It hasn't done it for all of them but it has for many of them. I'm not sure about all the details of the bug but be aware that it's likely your pictures will be replaced whether you want them to or not.
You also may have to sync a couple times before photos are synced to all the relevant contacts. Their photo download protocol looks pretty chatty and I guess some of the requests fail and they aren't re-trying until the next sync session.