We’re moving TiPb’s Facebook presence from the old group and page to a newer, shiner, and — soon to be — better, unified TiPb Fan Page!

The bad news: since we can’t rename the old iphoneblog.com page or transfer the group to go with new, we have to apologize for asking everyone to move over with us, but we’ll do our best to more than make up for the hassle — that’s a promise!

So, please jump on over and become a fan of our new TiPb Facebook Page — we’re waiting for you!

THE GOOD NEWS: the TiPb iPhone Accessory Store has been gracious enough to let us give away a brand new Motorola H17 Bluetooth Headset [$89.95 - TiPb Store link] to one of our Facebook fans to help ease the transition. The give-away starts now and ends Monday, March 1st, 2009 at 12pm PST so get to it!

(And this being Follow Friday, if you’re kind enough to follow @TiPb on Twitter and subscribe to our iTunes and YouTube feeds, we’d appreciate it — and you just might get in on some additional, upcoming give-aways to boot! Shhhhhh!)

TiPb Give Away: Motorola H17 Bluetooth Headset for a TiPb Facebook fan! is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Yesterday at Macworld two events helped clarify something I’ve been discussing with Dieter for a while now — Apple, the iPhone and iPad, and closed vs. open systems, control vs. chaos. These two events were a presentation by John Gruber of Daring Fireball concerning the 10 biggest problems faced by Apple, and a brief conversation with Leo Laporte of TWiT about Google Buzz.

As part of his Round Robin BlackBerry review, Dieter departed on a rant about BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) of epic proportions. A closed communications protocol, he argued, was untenable. BlackBerry users create incredible amounts of content in BBM (yes, chat is content) but it’s all completely closed off and owned by RIM. If you leave BlackBerry, you can’t take your BBM content with you. If RIM ever disappears, all your BBM content is lost. Something like Gmail on the other hand, works across platform and if you switch from BlackBerry to iPhone to Android, you enter your Gmail account and everything is there. Since you can access it via standard protocols like POP and IMAP, you can also make local copies and upload them to a different service (i.e. upload your mail to a non-Google IMAP folder).

Laporte made a similar comment about Twitter and Facebook. If either Twitter or Facebook were to fail, all your status updates, all your wall posts, all your friends and those you follow and/or follow you would be gone.

I don’t know if Google Buzz will prove to be an open protocol and system for sharing status, location, and relationships, and certainly it’s implementation shows signs of the typical Google “release now, fix later, polish never” model, but something needs to.

And this brings me rather circuitously back to Apple and the iPhone. As much as a certain segment decries Apple as “closed”, in terms of protocols they’re remarkably open. They use IMAP for mail, and open-sourced CalDAV and CardDAV for calendaring and contacts. They use WebDAV for web directories and WebKit for Safari. iChat supports most IM protocols, including Jabber. They use BSD Linux and the Darwin kernel for the core of Mac and iPhone.

Apple is generally built on top of open technologies, and one of their core strengths is melding that open architecture with tightly controlled (i.e. proprietary) user interface layers (and developer APIs, and App Store review processes).

For some, that last part is an absolute deal breaker. But they have Ubantu and Open Moko. (Yes, even Android is closed — you can’t muck about with Gmail or Google Maps apps). For mainstream users, however, the front end, the user experience, “just works” to the point where it’s become a cliche.

I said it previously in my Round Robin summation, to use Google you must give up privacy, to use Apple you must give up control. (I don’t even want to think about what I’m giving up to use Google on Apple!)

So proprietary interfaces to open technologies — how does that work for us? What happens when we use something not controlled by Apple?

John Gruber suggested AT&T as an example. Indeed, he listed it a one of Apple’s problems. Now, some people get great AT&T service while others have connection problems that have become near-legendary. Either way, it’s hurt media and mainstream perceptions about the iPhone.

Gruber also mentioned Big Media (movie and TV studios, music labels) as a problem. They want to charge more than the market will bear (certainly enough to make free-as-in-torrent an alternative) and make less available via iTunes than via a retro 1980s corner video store.

Is it a coincidence that some of the main aspects of the iPhone and iTunes that Apple has absolutely no control over are some that cause the greatest amount of user frustration?

(The App Store and its review process mostly create developer frustration, and Gruber listed this as a problem as well, though one that’s slightly improving since the holiday shut-down).

So, we come back to and down to Apple liking to control the user-facing aspects of the iPhone (and iPod touch, and soon, iPad) but using and promoting open standards for a lot of the technology underneath. While this approach might clash philosophically with some users (and again, Android, Palm, etc. aren’t open, they’re just more open) and practically for others (power users who want the control themselves), its proved remarkably effective for casual, mainstream users, and for power-users willing to give up some control for a better experience.

Except for that part about AT&T and Hollywood, but then those are controlled with little concern for user experience…

Closed vs. Open, Control vs. Chaos — What’s Best for Apple, the iPhone and iPad? is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Joe Hewitt, who developed the awesome Facebook 3.0, but controversially (and some would say detrimentally) left the iPhone platform before Facebook 3.1 over the App Store review process, has come out extremely positively about the iPad:

iPad is exactly the product I’ve been wishing for ever since I wrapped my mind around the iPhone and its constraints. While the rumor mill was churning with all kinds of crazy possibilities for the Apple tablet, I mostly rolled my eyes, because I felt strongly that all Apple needed to do to revolutionize computing was simply to make an iPhone with a large screen. Anyone who feels underwhelmed by that doesn’t understand how much of the iPhone OS’s potential is still untapped.

Hewitt claims the biggest constraint he had in making the ultimate Facebook app was screen size, and the iPad removes that completely. As to the “closed” nature of the iPhone as a platform?

The one thing that makes an iPhone/iPad app “closed” is that it lives in a sandbox, which means it can’t just read and write willy-nilly to the file system, access hardware, or interfere with other apps. In my mind, this is one of the best features of the OS. It makes native apps more like web apps, which are similarly sandboxed, and therefore much more secure. On Macs and PCs, you have to re-install the OS every couple years or so just to undo the damage done by apps, but iPhone OS is completely immune to this.

But what about his concerns over Apple’s role as iPhone — and now iPad — gatekeeper? Web apps is how he sees working around Apple. Anyone can make anything they want for the iPad, provided they’re willing to run it on their own server and not gunk up the end-users machine. That, Hewitt says, is the key to total client-side freedom.

So here’s hoping the platform gets Hewitt back, if not for Facebook 3.2 or 4.0 for the iPad, then for something equally as impressive…

[Thanks to Fassy for the tip!]

Former Facebook for iPhone Developer Joe Hewitt Says iPad “Everything He’s Been Wishing For” is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Batten down your contacts and defend your profile pics, because Facebook 3.1.2 for iPhone and iPod touch is here and it purports to fix those bugs that have been ailing ya:

• Fixes some crashes
• Fix a bug causing incorrect matches in address book sync
• Fix a bug causing incorrect matches for contacts with the same name

Here’s hoping that what has been, prior to 3.1, one of the best social networking apps on any platform, is back on track and ready rock.

Download it, try it out, let us know if it works!

Facebook 3.1.2 for iPhone Brings More Bug Fixes is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

As if Facebook 3.1 for iPhone and iPod touch didn’t have enough problems, dmackdaddy let us know this potentially embarrassing problem he’s experiencing with the new contact picture syncing functionality:

Beware of your profile pics, or your boss might get one of you doing something you don’t want them to see! What happens is, [Facebook 3.1] takes [all] the emails and phone numbers on your iPhone and sends them to Facebook. It then cross-checks and syncs them back to your iPhone. That’s a major security flaw right there! It should only sync the ones you’re friends with.

So for an example I have my coworker’s email and cell but I am not her Facebook friend. All of a sudden when I got a call from my coworker I saw a picture of her in a bikini because that was her [Facebook] profile pic!

I’m using Outlook 2010 and it has a new feature called Suggested Contacts where it keeps all your emails you been using. Those sync to my iPhone via exchange 2007. So now I have Facebook profile pics in Outlook 2010 for a bunch of folks that I don’t even really know just because I have emailed them.

Given the more casual (read: sometimes drunken and debauched) profile pictures that appear on Facebook, and the potential from cross-contamination between trusted friends and respected colleagues, if this is widespread the potential for embarrassment is high. Even if this is an isolated or semi-isolated incident, as more and more social network contact pools are integrated together, its worth remembering that anything — and everything — you put on the internet will eventually be seen by those people you least want to see it.

Remember, if though Facebook thinks privacy is dead, it may still be important to you and yours. So think twice and practice safe pics!

[Image above is a mockup based on the story -- no real coworkers were embarrassed in the making of this post]

Facebook 3.1 Contact Syncing — Got Bikini Pics? is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Facebook 3.1 brought the much-in-demand push notification service to the iPhone’s most popular social networking app, but no good deed goes unpunished, and along with broken push, it also brought a host of problems. Now, not everyone is having the same problem, but a lot of you have told us about one or more of the following:

• No push notifications: Seriously. Facebook updates their application to included push notifications and it doesn’t work most of the time.
• No alert sound to push notifications: Is sound turned on? Yes. So where is it?
• Commenting on photos: If you go to post a comment on a picture one of your friend’s posts you are greeted with a nice little “error” on a blank screen.
• Force closes: Now perhaps this is just a issue I am having but it seems as if the application loves to close on it’s own since the last update. Usually this is a sign of poor memory management.

We realize Joe Hewitt leaving left you in the lurch, but come on Facebook, you have Microsoft money and one of the most consistently popular apps in the app store! A 1.0 app from a startup we understand, but 3.1 from the social networking giant? It’s never a wise idea to use the general public as your beta testers. If the application is not ready for prime time, don’t release a sub-par application. Wait. You’ll have more time and we’ll get a better app. Now that you’ve released it, however, we’re all stuck, and you need to get it fixed and yesterday.

Did we miss any other major issues going on within this application? Feel free to vent in the comments below!

Now please excuse me while I go dust off Boxcar and put it back into action…

Dear Facebook — Please Fix Facebook 3.1 for iPhone and Soon is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

No sooner did Facebook 3.1 [Free - iTunes link] finally bring push notifications to Facebook’s iPhone app… then a few bugs popped up. Proving Apple’s iTunes App Store can turn around updates with lightning speed when they decide to, an update has already been released to squash those bugs and get everyone updating, friending, event inviting, and otherwise getting social with it as fast and furiously as possible.

Does Facebook 3.1.1 fix things for you? Let us know in the comments. And if you’re still having issues, let us know that as well!

Facebook 3.1.1 for iPhone… Brings Bug Fixes! is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

When TiPb posted on Mplayit, being a huge iPhone and Facebook fan, I decided to take a closer look and here’s what I found — Mplayit takes browsing and buying iPhone apps to a whole new level. Mplayit is an application on facebook, or a website on your iPhone, that allows you to find apps, read a description, rating and an iTunes link to download them. Sound familiar? There’s more, Mplayit not only does these things well, but also gives you YouTube videos of apps and ways to share the app. In facebook you can share on your wall or send a message. There are also links to share via Twitter or email. On the iPhone, you can share via the mail app.

Apps can also be added to Mplayit’s “collections” feature. Simply click the add to my collection link on your favorite app. Mplayit will also “learn” over time what apps to recommend to you based on what you add to your collection. You can search for apps by typing the name in the search box, or you can choose to look at apps based on category.

I am very excited about this new way to browse apps for your iPhone. The added value of video and wide array of sharing options along with collections make this one compelling alternative to the iTunes app store.

Have friends that don’t have an iPhone? That’s ok, word on the street says that Mplayit will be launching soon on BlackBerry and Android platforms. Check out the screenshots below for examples of the desktop app and iPhone webpage. You can read more about Mplayit on their corporate site, or on Twitter.

Mplayit for Facebook and iPhone is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

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Join Rene, Chad, and Precentral.net’s Keith Newman for Apple gaming, profit share, OnLive, private API, Facebook fallout, Verizon attack ads and AT&T strikes back, gPhone cometh, Palm Pixi, and all the news, plus your questions answered! Listen in!

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Thanks to the the iPhone Blog Store for sponsoring the podcast, and to everyone who showed up for the live chat!

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TiPb Presents: iPhone Live! #76 — Game On! is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Facebook for iPhone and iPod touch [Free - iTunes link], by updating to version 3.03 for “minor bug fixes and Japanese localization”, but underneath that listing all the major changes from the original 3.0 release, has resulted in flood of tips to TiPb actual. Shows us a few things:

1. Wow but do people love that Facebook for iPhone app
2. Devs need to be careful how they list their changeroll
3. Users need to be careful how they read the changeroll

Still, if you’ve been experiencing bugs, or really wanted to get your Japanese on, this updated is for you!

Facebook for iPhone Updates to 3.03 “Minor Bug Fixes and Japanese Localization” is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog