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Official Facebook for Windows Phone app to be updated to “Mango” version next week

Oct 26, 2011 3:35 pm by damaster | 10 comments

With Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” update, Microsoft baked the best of Facebook directly into the OS, bringing features like Facebook Chat and Check-ins in addition to the integrated contact list, social feeds, photo albums and more. You might argue that with all these features built-in, you won’t ever need a separate Facebook app. However, there are just some things that you can’t do with the built-in Facebook functionality (for example, I can’t tag my friends when I check-in to a location, see who’s liked my post, or even “like” a comment). This is when an actual official Facebook app will come in handy, for the occasional things that I can’t yet do with the built-in stuff.

However, the Facebook for Windows Phone app hasn’t really really been updated since it’s release a year ago, and not to mention that it doesn’t take advantage of all the “Mango” features that came with Windows Phone 7.5 update. Well according to Pocket-lint.com, Joe Belfiore, Corporate Vice President for Windows Phone Program Management, today confirmed at Nokia World that the “Mango”-fied version of the official Facebook app will be released to the Windows Phone Marketplace as soon as next Monday (October 31).

According to Joe Belfiore, the update will bring many new features to the Facebook app, here’s what Pocket-lint.com said:

Confirming the news at Nokia World in London, Belfiore told the crowd in attendance that users will be able to deep link into the app to allow shortcut tiles on the Windows Phone 7 homepage.
That means Messages and News Feeds on the Homepage of the phone. [seen in image above]

Not much else was given away, but apparently Belfiore did confirm that it will be a free update, and “works in addition to the embedded functionality the mobile operating system already offers with Facebook.”

This entry was posted in Mobile and tagged Apps, Facebook, Mango, Nokia World, Windows Phone. Bookmark the permalink.

Anonymous
On a related note, today I noticed that a couple of my favorite Facebook friends’ status updates have mysteriously started showing up on the Me tile…that’s MY Me tile. These aren’t comments on my updates. I’m being notified that someone else has updated their status via my Me tile. Weird, huh? Anyone else noticing this? Has something changed on Facebook’s end?
- Damaster – LiveSide.net
  Not sure, haven’t seen it here. Were you tagged in your friend’s updates? Or have you also commented on their updates beforehand? These might show up on your Me tile too.
- Brandon
  Is it saying you have a message? That could the FB feature where you subscribe to certain people’s status updates that are then forwarded via SMS.�
- Nikhil
  The same thing happened to my me title.
  - Candid Calum
    My reply to gregsedwards above may help you :) It’s very likely that is what is happening.
- Candid Calum
  This is likely to be due to the setting for notifications in your Facebook ‘Close friends’ list. When Facebook very recently released its updated Lists feature, they added an option for you to receive notifications whenever someone you’ve added to your ‘Close friends’ list submits a new post; they enabled that option by default for everyone. To check this and disable it if you desire, navigate to your ‘Close friends’ list in the left sidebar on the Home page of facebook.com (you may have to click the Lists link, if you don’t see it in the sidebar by default), and check the Notifications drop down in the top-right corner of the List :)
markiz
Finaly. I hate that built-in chat in mango does not support messages.
- Candid Calum
  I hate this as well, and it’s important to note that the new version of Facebook for Windows Phone doesn’t include a tile notification for the pinned Messages tile, so it still isn’t that useful compared to how helpful integration of offline Facebook messages in the Windows Phone Messaging hub would be. It wouldn’t have been hard for the Windows Phone developers to support offline Facebook messages, especially now the Facebook Chat and Facebook Messages products are integrated. I wonder whether the people who make decisions about Windows Phone features were even aware of the integration between the two products. . . . It happened in November 2010 (a month after Windows Phone 7.0 was released).
  I do hope Microsoft get their act together with the Facebook integration; it’s one of the most important aspects of Windows Phone for me. Another disappointment was that they overlooked allowing us to tag our friends when we check in (even though that check in feature publishes to Windows Live and Twitter, as well as Facebook, it wouldn’t have been hard for them to cater for tagging Facebook friends).
  If Microsoft haven’t supported the new Facebook Subscriptions feature and the audience selector by the time Apollo is released, I will lose a lot of faith in them. I’ve already lost confidence in the Zune team for not being one of the initial partners for Facebook Music.
  In regard to the social networking integration in Windows Phone, due to how often features are released for these services, especially Facebook, I believe Microsoft should schedule social network integration improvements to follow a separate, more regular update path. Many of us could do with integration of Facebook Subscriptions well before Apollo is due. Microsoft must be quick with integrating new social network features because many who see social network integration as important could be turned off, due to how feature-rich the official iPhone Facebook application is compared to both Facebook for Windows Phone and the Windows Phone Facebook integration.
Yogi
Since the baked in Facebook functionality in Windows Phone is considered a third party app, it is useless to me. Too many of my Facebook friends have used their privacy settings to not allow sharing of their information to third party apps. Because of this, many of their posts never show up on the People Hub news feed. More information on the problem is available here:
http://wmpoweruser.com/wp7-facebook-feed-issues-being-caused-by-new-facebook-privacy-settings/
- Candid Calum
  This is a huge problem that both Facebook and Microsoft should address ASAP. It is shocking that the two companies haven’t yet agreed a way for the Windows Phone Facebook app (not Facebook for Windows Phone, but the app that handles Windows Phone Facebook integration) to be seen as an ‘official’ app, and thus not third party. Luckily for me, I’ve managed to convince the one friend of mine who had turned off Platform apps to turn them on again, so this problem doesn’t affect me now, but it could affect me again in the future and it negatively affects many users.