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Nearly two weeks after submitting the app to Apple, Facebook’s totally revamped 3.0 application is finally live on the App Store, according to the app’s developer Joe Hewitt . You can download it now here . The store currently shows that the app is version 2.5, but if you click the Download button anyway you’ll get the new version. The new application brings a slew of new features, making it what may be the most useful app on the App Store (be sure to read this post) for our full review. Among the additions are Events, which have frustratingly been omitted from previous versions. Now you’ll be able to look up where your Events are, and you can also respond to them and see which of your friends are attending (for anyone who has ever had to boot up the web version of the site just to look up an Event address, this is a big deal). You can also post video directly to the site if you have an iPhone 3GS — a feature that will likely see the number of videos on Facebook increase dramatically. Smaller changes include a News Feed that more closely reflects the feed you’ll find on the main Facebook site, as well as the ability to “Like” items your friends have created. One feature that users will be missing is Push Notifications, which we suspect will be rolled out in version 3.1, which Hewitt is already working on. There will also be support for landscape mode in the upcoming release, and we may also see support for the ability to watch Facebook videos from the phone (right now you can only upload them). It’s worth noting that the 11 day wait since Facebook originally submitted the application was enough to raise Hewitt’s ire (and justifiably so), leading him to condemn the App Store approval process and call for its removal entirely. I couldn’t agree with him more.

During Apple’s Q4 earnings call today, a question was asked about how Apple viewed its increased competition for the iPhone in the coming holiday season. In particular, it was asked how Apple views all the new Android phones coming out. Apple COO Tim Cook made Apple’s stance very clear: They’re still catching up with the first iPhone. Yes, Apple views the smartphone market as still being behind the first phone they released over two years ago. “We’ve moved beyond that,” Cook noted. Certainly, compared to some smartphones out there, the first iPhone still compares very well. The iPhone 3G compares even better — as we’ve written before, it’s kind of like James Bond, while a lot of others at the same price are Joe Schmoe. But to say the original iPhone is ahead of phones like the Palm Pre and the myTouch 3G seems a bit disingenuous. That said, the iPhone 3GS is, in my view, still absolutely ahead of the competiton, including the aforementioned phones. By many accounts, the upcoming Verizon Droid phone could be first real challenger to the current leading iPhone. Verizon obviously feels the same way, given its advertising campaign.

Privacy bugs at Facebook are nothing new, but that doesn’t make them any easier to stomach. Last week we caught wind of a new one that was relatively benign, but could have been a field day for mischief makers and spammers. Don’t worry, it didn’t give anyone access to your personal information — but it did let you post to the Wall of any Facebook Page you wanted, which can’t be welcome news to the major brands on Facebook, or politicians who go to great lengths to maintain a pristine public image. We spoke with Facebook about the problem last week and held this post until it issued a fix this evening.
This latest bug stemmed from Facebook’s impressive new iPhone app, which was released just over a week ago. The new app reproduces much of the functionality found on the Facebook homepage, including the ability to browse through News Feeds and Facebook Pages, and to post to these feeds. Unfortunately, the app failed to pay attention to some of the privacy settings involved with these actions.
On Facebook, Page administrators are given control over who can post to their walls — if you want to keep your page clean and display only your updates, you can block users from posting their comments. Alternatively, you can let users comment into an area that’s “Just for fans”, or you can show both fan comments and the Page’s updates in the same feed. Most brands use the first or second option, so that new visitors to their Pages only see content that they control by default (e.g. shared links and status updates).
The iPhone application ignored these settings, allowing you to post to a Page even if it was only supposed to be displaying posts from the Page Administrator. So, for example, you could visit President Obama’s Page, which understandably doesn’t allow for any comments, and write whatever you wanted to his feed. Granted, this wouldn’t get syndicated out to other users like his updates would, but anyone who visited Facebook.com/BarackObama would see your message nestled between President Obama’s shared links.

Despite having one of the most popular online photo services in the world, Flickr has done things the hard way on the iPhone. That is to say, for browsing photos they’ve made you go through their optimized website, and for uploading you had to do it through email. Both worked fine, but were not as seamless as a native iPhone application. Now they have that as well. Yahoo’s Flickr app has just gone live in the App Store. After only a little bit of time using it, I can tell that I’m going to like it. The main screen is a fairly mesmerizing slideshow of photos from your contacts on Flickr. There is an upload button that is easily accessible right on the main page, and the upload process is nice and easy. You can obviously name your picture and give it a description, but you can also easily manage what set to put it in, and what tags to give it. And the privacy settings are very clearly displayed on the upload page.There has been no shortage of third-party applications that used Flickr’s pictures, but this app matches the look and feel of Flickr proper much more closely than any of them. Individual photo pages look great and commenting is easy. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be an easy way to send pictures to Twitter, except through the emailing method. The main page search functionality works well, and thumbnails are populated quickly. If you click on a photo, you can also go to a larger version loaded in a different screen that allows you to swipe left and right to move between images. It does not look like pinch to zoom works, however.

Apple has long been associated with the saying “it just works”. Well, sometimes it apparently works a little too well, to the point of allowing users to delete their entire Flickr libraries in one fell swoop without really meaning to. Oops. The problem stems from the way Apple’s popular iPhoto software is integrated with Flickr. Recent versions of iPhoto allow users to sync specified albums with Flickr, which means they can automatically upload new photos as soon as they import them into iPhoto from their cameras, and change their captions for both at once. The problem is that iPhoto treats this syncing very literally: if you delete a photo from one of these albums on iPhoto, it doesn’t just remove it from the Set on Flickr — it actually deletes the photo from your Flickr account entirely. iPhoto apparently informs users that when they stop sharing a photo album between iPhoto and Flickr, “The album no longer appears on Flickr, but the photos remain in your [iPhoto] library.” The wording is both ambiguous (Apple could just mean it’s deleting the photos from the Flickr set) and not nearly strong enough to suggest that it’s actually deleting data. And plenty of people have made that mistake. Over the last several weeks this has led to a number of threads in Flickr’s help forum where some users are up in arms after accidentally deleting hundreds of photos at once.