WP7 People Hub Facebook Integration

One of the features of the new Windows Phone 7 that I really like is the full integration of Facebook into the People Hub.  The People Hub is like your traditional mobile phone contact list on steroids.  Not only does it store the contact information for all of your friends, family and colleagues, but if you have a Facebook account, you can configure the People Hub to pull in updates for all of your friends as well.

The reason why this feature is so great is that Facebook updates are not limited to just status messages and picture posts, but includes your friends’ actual contact information as well.  This means that if one of your friends update their phone number or address on Facebook, that information is synchronized to your phone immediately.  I no longer have to chase people down for their contact information when it changes.

This feature was somewhat available in the past on iPhone using the Facebook application.  You could browse your friends in the Facebook app like a contact list and initiate a phone call to them.  But the integration was only one way, outgoing.  If one of your friends called your phone, you wouldn’t see a name or a picture unless you saved that person’s information in your local contact list.

Of course this feature presents one problem.  I, like most Facebook users, befriend most people I come in contact with so that I can get in touch with that person in the future if I ever want to.  I have also used Facebook as a way to reconnect with many of my childhood friends.  This means that I have over 500 Facebook friends and though I want to stay in touch with most of those people, I don’t necessarily need them in my contact list on my phone.  A simple “Hide contact on this device” feature may solve that problem in the future.

What about people that don’t post their contact information on Facebook or colleagues that I don’t want to befriend on Facebook?  Well, the WP7 has the ability to sync its contact list with multiple data sources such as Windows Live and Google as well.  That means you can manually manage their contact information in another location.  Sync’ing with multiple data sources may lead to duplicate entries in your contact list but WP7 does a pretty good job at linking duplicate contacts.  What’s even cooler is when you open a linked contact, the phone shows you from what data source each field was pulled from.

Another question many of you are probably asking, is Facebook really the right data source to be pulling this information from?  I asked myself the same question and I say yes… for now.  Never in the history of the Inter-web has their been a site with such a high adoption rate whose users were willing to post so much personal information.  That being the case, Facebook is the best personal contact data source for my money at the moment.  Of course we all need to realize that, like all great things in life, Facebook will one day be overtaken by the next best thing.  But when that day comes, I will likely be onto my next mobile phone anyway.

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