DROIDICAL

The Facebook app that came already installed on the Droid / Android 2.0 is simple and would seem to have everything you need.  The funny thing is that I find myself using the facebook mobile site available through the browser more.

On the positive side I like the simplicity, always wins with me.  In fact when my wife first saw it she blurted out that she wished Facebook on the web could be like that. There seems to be a tight integration with the camera and Gallery application which works nicely. It shows your update stream, friends, photo, profile, notifications, and let’s you take a photos for immediate upload to your profile.  For viewing friends status updates it works great.  I use groups on the web side so I can filter out my different types of ‘friends’ but this just takes the whole feed of updates together. Updating status is simple.

All my notifications come to my GMail account so now those are popping instantly into my Android GMail app.  When I first started to get them I was flipping back over to the Facebook application to find the comment or message and reply to it.  It wasn’t easy to find… even using the Notifications tab.  I found that clicking on the link itself ending up redirecting me over to Facebook mobile site touch.facebook.com which seemed just as simple and yet have a little better set of features.

One important piece in particular that the stand alone app is sorely missing is my ‘Inbox’ where I can view direct messages friends sent me.  Besides that, going from GMail to facebook mobile site was much more seamless and a better overall experience.

May be I will introduce it to people who are getting tired of the cluttered web browser experience, but then they might miss their Mafia Wars.