I was just flicking through my newsfeed and saw that a friend had changed their mobile number. So far, not that interesting... until I noticed that Facebook went on to say 'and it's been added to your Phonebook'. I took a look, and sure enough there were all my friends in alphabetical order, with their different numbers, all searchable. This was interesting, as earlier on I'd just read about the Palm/Treo Facebook application which, according to FaceReviews, allows you to ' Open your Contacts and dial your friends with just one touch.' Sounds a lot like Facebook are moving more and more to integrate your mobile addressbook with your Facebook friend list - similar to what Yahoo! are doing with One Connect, and a few other services people are working on.
I already use the Facebook application for Blackberry, and occasionally m.facebook.com off my phone browser, both of which are useful for different things, but I decided to delve a bit deeper into Facebook.com/mobile and see what else was on offer. It turns out that there's a lot of functionality just on pure SMS - including not just status updates and private messages, poking etc, but also adding friends, writing notes, and - my favourite - getting the mobile number of one of your friends. You just text in 'cell john smith' and you get a text back immediately with all their contact details.
Quite interesting is the ability to choose certain friends' status updates to follow - and Facebook will text you whenever they change.
At the moment there aren't any links to the mobile section from the homepage until you've actively gone to the mobile section and authorised your phone, but they're obviously working hard on integrating the mobile Facebook experience in different ways. With all the buzz around mobile social networks going on, and some bloggers proclaiming that the major online social networks will be swept away by these, it will be interesting to watch as Facebook moves more heavily into this space.
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