Over the last few days there have been murmurs of an official Facebook app for the iPad which has been noticeably absent given high expectations when the iPad was launched last year. As time wore on, people came to accept that an app was just a fairytale and that using the full website in Safari was probably not bad at all.
The only drawback was that you could not upload locally stored photos and videos to Facebook whilst using the website. This would be something only taken care of by a native app on the iPad. Given that the original iPad wasn’t able to capture photos or videos this wasn’t such a big deal (unless you wanted to share the content already on it) but the new iPad changes things in this respect (putting aside the crappy cameras).
Furthermore, there are already other apps out there for the desperate including Friendly and Flipboard that make consuming Facebook content a more interactive experience (without ads I might mention). If Zuckerberg hadn’t been all high and mighty about the iPad not being a mobile device and shunning the possibility of an official app then he could have stopped revenue leakage and stomped on competitive Facebook client apps early in the piece.
Another thing to bear in mind is that Steve Jobs has had his work cut out for him trying to get chummy with Mark Zuckerberg whilst the Gates/Zuckerberg side of things seems to be quite rosey. Smartphones are incredibly popularwhich is perhaps why an iPhone app had to be created but tablets are still a smaller slice of the market in comparison – essentially, Zuckerberg can afford to be frosty to Apple.
At the end of the day, if there was an official app for iPad I wouldn’t give it a second look. The website does the trick just fine and with ample real estate on screen there isn’t much need to streamline the generation operations of the Facebook site.
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