Facebook updates iPhone, iPad apps with Chat Heads, Stickers and more

Facebook yesterday released an update for its iPhone and iPad apps. The update known as Facebook 6.0 releases enough significant changes, for both iPad and iPhone apps with respect to design, font, messaging, for it to alter your user experience. Here’s a quick look at some key changes: Chat Heads: From Facebook’s Android Home, Chat Heads have made their way into iOS as well. However unlike in Android Home and in the Android Facebook Messenger app where Chat Heads float into different apps, in iOS they are obviously restricted to the Facebook app. Facebook is clearly taking messaging much more seriously as both the iPad and the iPhone app have given greater prominence to the Chat Bar. The cool thing is that Messages are always on, floating around as little bob heads, no matter what you’re doing in the app. The annoying thing is that they are always floating around and on a small iPod or an iPhone screen, you might find the app too cluttered if there are relentless floating Chat Heads. To close the Chat Head, you can simply drag it to the bottom of the app and it will disappear. [caption id=“attachment_705430” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The new Facebook iOS app. Image from Facebook.[/caption] Stickers: Stickers are like emoticons except they’re bigger, much bigger and you can choose to download them in Packs. According to The Verge, Facebook has created a small store where you can find and download packs of stickers — the version we tested all had those packs marked as “Free."  However Facebook is likely to introduce some paid packs pretty soon. Stickers haven’t yet made their way to the iPad app but hopefully should be available soon. News Feed: With the new update, the News Feed has made its way into both apps. As Facebook had shown in the launch of the new News Feed, all the content has moved more to the centre, pictures have more emphasis, as do thumbnails. Incidentally all links, tags, names are now shown in Black and Bold. The distinctive blue colour of tags is gone. What will be interesting to see, is if users respond to so much detail and prominence given to updates rather than seeing more in one scroll. Especially in the iPad mini and iPhone you see too little in each scroll, when you compare it to the previous experience. Good for publishers (i.e. in the competition with Twitter) but not so great for users who quickly want to see want a slew of friends might have said. In the iPhone app, I did see the option to check out different kinds of News Feeds such as Photos, Following, Friends, etc. Interestingly when I was browsing through the ‘Friends’ only feed, I didn’t see any ads. But the iPad app, which has only one News Feed for now did have ads.   Also when a New Story appears, the pop-up announcing it is much bigger and more prominent.  The images, especially cover images, don’t look oddly shaped and stretched. Clearly with the new updates to its iOS apps Facebook is putting more emphasis on design and messaging. The iPad app has definitely straightened out its presentation clumsiness, but the sparse approach to tablets, compared to what you can do on the web, still reveals that Facebook has a long way to go in mastering tablet devices. For instance, only on landscape mode in the iPad do you see chat on the right hand side.