The BlackBook of FaceBerry

Hello, my name is Dominic Jaar and I am a crackberry.

I also happen to be a Facebooker, even if I not too active on that front. Nevertheless, on October 24th, I installed the new Facebook application on my Blackberry 8830 to give it a test drive. If you do not want to read through my complaint, let me just tell you that it has been uninstalled…

First, it took me two days of troubleshooting and forum surfing to be able to make it work passed “There was an error contacting Facebook”. I looked everywhere to find the solution and even stumbled upon a Facebook thread on the issue. Finally, Techland provided me with a workaround until Blackberry added the explanations to itsTechnical
Support Center.

Once I was connected, I quickly realised that we were only provided with the basic functionalities: change status, Poke, upload pics and send message to or invite friends. I rarely give my status (no time), can’t see the utility of poking (anyone does?), try to keep only one face and an avatar on the web, I use email, PIN or SMS to send messages and never (ok, let’s say once or twice) invite friends to Facebook. What is the utility then?For people with Blackberry Curve (with camera) who like to post pictures on Facebook, it might be useful because you just need to select the picture you just took (at your favourite show), click menu>send via Facebook and within seconds, the whole world knows where you are, you lucky dude! However, use that feature strategically if you don’t want to be busted like Kevin Colvin…

Another issue is that I was logged in all the time and couldn’t find a way to log out. Well, it seems I didn’t because there is no way you can do it… Results: your battery dies a lot quicker and, I suspect, you get dirty bills from your service provider.

Moreover, the application does not support the highly intellectual and sophisticated third party apps (Funwall, Zombie, Beer drinker, etc.).

Nevertheless, I think, marketingwise, it is a brilliant move for both partners to enter new markets. It enables Facebook the teenager to get on the lawyers’ tool and Blackberry to attract younger clients. However, with the increasing quality of browsing offered by the new generations of PDAs, why would you want to load a client when you can access the webbased app? How come, on computers, we are moving away from pc clients to webapp while, on PDAs, we doing the opposite? The motivations to do so on computers seem to be applicable to PDAs in an even more pressing way due to the small memories of the latter.