The Facebook Timeline finally launched last week, introducing the world to the cover photo and the ability to peruse their friends’ lives over the years with incredible ease. And now, you can do it from your iPhone.
The Android app for the new Facebook was available last week, but now the iOS world welcomes the changes. Here’s a quick look at all of the new features available in the iPhone for Facebook app.
Friend lists
In general, everything is far more seamless than the last iteration of Facebook for iOS. This also applies to adding friends. Adding new contacts to lists is now done with fewer steps, and when you accept a friend request you automatically are able to dictate what list they belong in.
Notifications
Notifications now are visible from a pop-up screen that lays over your News Feed. Instead of being redirected to another page, you get a much quicker look on everything you want to know. Messages and friend requests do the same thing: no more being sent to and fro over Facebook mobile to utilize your account, and this without a doubt an incredibly helpful fix.
Timeline
Like its initial release, you will only see Timelines if you opted into them when prompted this past week (you can’t do this from the mobile version, it’s Web only). From users’ Timelines, you can determine how you subscribe to them via a Subscription button on their profiles.
Our only complaint: you can’t limit or edit your own Activity Log yet. We all know how important it is to now pay even more attention to what you’re posting. But having editing controls over this isn’t available from the app.
Photo fixes
In general photos on Facebook have been incredibly buggy. You will click on an album photo only to find yourself looking at another image from the album entirely. Scrolling through an album is also very nearly impossible: everything’s out of order and it makes viewing an extreme challenge.
Facebook has—finally—fixed this bug and now the world makes sense again. Photos also load faster. The Facebook app is so incredibly popular and Photos are arguably the most important part of the platform for users, and it’s sort of mind-blowing we’ve put up with such a barely functioning feature. Props to Facebook for addressing this with Facebook 4.1.
IPad support isn’t here quite yet, but we already know there’s an option to get your tablet-Timeline fix if you really need it.
