Facebook For iPhone Finally Gets Push

Well it's about damn time! Facebook pushed out an update last night to its incredibly popular iPhone app [iTunes link]. The 3.0 update was a great shift in the usibility of the app. One of the things missing, though, was the inclusion of push notifications. Well, now we've got 'em with another little bonus. The app now also syncs profile pictures with your contacts. Users can select whether or not they want to overwrite existing contact photos, and the process takes a few minutes the first time, but seems to work just fine.

The addition of push notifications, however, is less-than-exciting for me. I'm a Droid user now, and I keep my iPhone around for funsies. I use it as an iPod with a camera built in (psst, apple!). So, now that I'm on Android, I really appreciate how much I've been missing without being able to multitask since I get notifications for everything. But, before I turn into a fanboy, the Facebook app is great and has some of the best UI refinements on the platform and for certain whoops the crap out of its Android counterpart.

Thing is, this is infringing territory on popular push app Boxcar's functionality. Boxcar, a previously paid app, just went free a few months ago. Their model offers one free service to recieve push notifications for, charging a flat fee for every service (like Facebook) you add after that. This is great news for users, because now users can have more noticications pushed to them, but it means it's one less reason to use Boxcar's very successful product. One more photo after the jump.

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