Facebook on Evan Hoffman

Facebook for iPhone - "Places" hangs on "Locating you..."

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 14:00:38 +0000

I decided to see how “Places” stacked up with Foursquare. I reactivated my Facebook account and reinstalled the iPhone app. Went to “Places” and clicked “Check In,” and… nothing. It mentioned something about turning on Location Services. I know I already have that enabled because other apps are using it without problem. Turns out you need to enable Location Services explicitly:

First, go to the Settings app and select General:

Facebook for iPhone - "Places" hangs on "Locating you..."

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 14:00:38 +0000

First, go to the Settings app and select General:

A less insidious way to use Facebook?

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 08:58:19 +0000

I deactivated my Facebook account a couple of months ago. I just kind of got tired of seeing silly updates from friends and “friends” - people I’d friended but wasn’t really friends with. I was also frustrated by the privacy implications of using such a service: you tell it about yourself, you tell it about who you know and how you know them, you keep adding more information about you and your friends to its huge brain that it’s free to use or abuse however it wants.

Vonage iPhone App Calls Facebook Friends Free, So What?

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 10:59:58 +0000

Lots of outlets seem to have picked up the story about the new Vonage iPhone app that lets you call your Facebook friends free. I don’t understand why this is even newsworthy. There are a bunch of free VOIP apps for iPhone already, with Skype being the one that comes to mind first. But a couple of other things have me scratching my head about this story:

AT&T doesn’t offer the unlimited data plan for iPhone anymore, so this “free” call could end up being pretty expensive over 3G.
If you’re making a call to another friend with the iPhone app, then your friend probably has an iPhone. They’re also probably also on AT&T, so a regular voice call to them would be free anyway. So just call them?

This might make more sense to me if your friend is outside the US, or they come out with a similar app for other platforms, but even then… so what? Free VOIP calls aren’t new. Is it just the Facebook tie-in? I don’t get the buzz. Maybe it’s because I have 5,000 rollover minutes with AT&T.