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Facebook has just announced the launch of a new Create Application API, which makes it easier than ever for users to build secondary apps based off of another app. It sounds like a good idea at first, but it comes with one nasty consequence: those viral and sometimes incredibly annoying quiz applications are going to become more popular than ever. Fortunately Facebook has had the foresight to release the new API with a complimentary new feature — you’ll now be able to block the parent application of any of these quizzes, which means you can hide many of them from your News Feed with one click of the ‘Hide’ button.

For those who haven’t tried out one of these quiz apps, here’s a refresher. There are a number of very popular quiz generators on Facebook that let people create their own, secondary applications that they can share with their friends. But actually going through the process has been a bit tricky — users had to deal with Facebook’s developer app and API keys, which is hardly familiar territory for the vast majority of Facebook users (though many made it through the process anyway). The new API eliminates much of this hassle, allowing quiz makers to automate the application creation process. And that means we’re going to be seeing lots more quizzes.

Of course, many of us aren’t exactly keen on seeing countless quizzes filling up our News Feed. This wouldn’t be a problem if they acted the same way as most applications do — after all, you can hide any application from your News Feed. But because each quiz is treated as a unique app, you have to manually hide each new quiz that one of your friends makes. At least, until now.

Now you’ll be able to block all quizzes from the parent Quiz Generator applications, which means you’ll be able to hide many of them at once without having to deal with them again. It will be interesting to se what the net effect on the quiz makers will be: they’ll be easier to use than ever, but it’s also much easier to ignore them.

Aside from its importance to Quiz Makers, the new API has plenty of other uses. Developers on Facebook will now more easily be able to offer self-serve custom app generators (for example, you could build an application that sports teams could use to build their own branded applications). The API can also be used by services like Disqus to further streamline integrating Facebook Connect on sites outside of Facebook.

Photo by alexanderdrachmann.

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When Facebook launched the 2.0 version of its iPhone app in September of last year, it was a huge upgrade from its original app that launched with the App Store last July. And now it’s on the verge of launching the 3.0 version of the app, and having tested it today, we can safely say that it once again takes Facebook on the device to the next level. In fact, it may be the most useful app on the iPhone now, period.

This new version simply improves upon the old one in just about every way imaginable. Not only does it have a wide range of new options and features, many of which we went over previously, but it’s actually faster. And the design is rather brilliant. Built by Facebook engineer Joe Hewitt, the app manages to maintain the good practices found in many iPhone apps, while at the same time creating its own unique look and feel.

Features

Nowhere is this new look more evident than on the new Facebook home screen. It’s sort of like the iPhone main screen, but with a different, distinctive design. The large buttons are easy to hit, and best of all, you can add people’s profiles and pages as icons as well, to provide shortcuts to your favorites.

The main screen that you were probably used to from the old app now resides in the upper left corner of the main screen, as the “News Feed.” It largely looks the same but the ability to “like” items has been added to the ability to comment on them. You can also now easily take and post videos if you have an iPhone 3GS. Hitting the “News Feed” button in the upper right hand corner, allows you to sort this feed by the various filters you’ve set up.

The “Profile” area is the next button on the main screen. The overall look and feel have been updated, and now also include the “like” and “comment” elements on the Wall. You can also now see your profile pictures.

The “Friends” area has been updated to include both Friends and Pages. But a killer feature may be the ability to hit the phone icon and have the option to call or text your contacts. People who consider Facebook to be their contact list, will love this.

The “Inbox” is the next main area, and it now features not only new messages, but updates from your groups, and sent messages. But the best thing about this feature is how fast messages load. It’s leaps and bounds better than trying to load messages on the regular Facebook, and I think from now on I’ll simply use the app to respond to any emails I get through it.

The “Chat” and “Requests” areas remain largely the same, though both have been cleaned up.

The big new feature of this app has to be “Events”. The lack of a way to even see events in the previous version of the app was a major complaint against it — it had people using the web interface to log-in specifically to find events. Now, not only can you see them in the app, you can see details like the address of the event and host of it. And you can RSVP, and you can see who else is attending. With so many Facebook users now using its events feature for social gatherings, it simply made no sense not to have this in there. The Events area also features a “Birthdays” tab to specifically see which of your friends’ birthday is coming up.

The “Photos” area now allows you to create new photo albums, and it is significantly easier and more obvious as to how to tag someone in a picture. And at last, Facebook photos allow you to take advantage of the iPhone’s multi-touch to pinch zoom in and out of pictures.

The last main page element is “Notes,” which is new. You can see, edit and create new notes from here, just in case your Status Updates don’t give you enough room for all you want to say.

Below the main elements is the “Notifications” area that seems to update in near real-time when someone comments or “likes” one of your items or an item you’ve commented on.

What’s Missing

As good as this new Facebook iPhone app is, there are still some missing features. The two biggest ones are Push Notifications and a robust search. Hewitt had mentioned previously that Push Notifications would not be in 3.0, but hinted that they could come in 3.1. He stated on Twitter that with 3.0 done, the work is already starting on 3.1.

When we asked him about any new features for that build, Hewitt said he wasn’t ready to comment on specifics yet. But it’s probably a good bet that Push Notifications will be one of them. And earlier today, he also noted that there will be a landscape mode in 3.1. And he’s also noted that videos recorded on the iPhone 3GS don’t yet play in the app because Facebook doesn’t encode them in an iPhone-compatible way. That should change soon too.

The bigger omission, as I see it, is the lack of a robust search tool. Facebook recently rolled out the upgraded search functionality on its site, but on the iPhone searching is limited to profiles and pages. Basically, it’s useless, as you can get much of this information from the Friends area. If Facebook is serious about search, it needs to make basically everything that gets updated on the site (allowed for by individual’s privacy settings, of course) searchable on its mobile app in real-time. That would be a killer feature.

Overall

Overall, the Facebook 3.0 iPhone app is a huge step forward as a social tool. In fact, in terms of the data it lets you access, it’s hard to argue that any app is more robust. It’s now basically a way to keep track of and remark about what your friends are up to, an always up-to-date contact list, a picture and video sharer, an inbox, an IM client, and a event coordinator, all tied to over 250 million social users.

With the additions of Push Notifications and a better search tool, it will be nearly perfect. And all of these new features wrapped into an app that is even zippier, makes this a great (and free) upgrade.

Update: Hewitt has just let us know about another really nice feature. If you tap the Facebook logo, you’ll automatically go back to the main home screen. Tap it again and you’ll return to where you just were. Subtle, but nice feature.

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Just hours after we broke the news that Facebook had acquired FriendFeed comes Facebook’s announcement that it’s deploying its improved search product to everyone. This improved search functionality, which has been in testing since June, gives users the ability to search through shared media and status updates from their friends and the Pages they follow. And, perhaps more importantly, it lets users search through updates shared to ‘everyone’. The gloves are off — Facebook is going after Twitter where it hurts.

The new search will be a breath of fresh air to anyone who has previously tried to search Facebook for, well, anything. Under the old system, users had to browse through clunky categories to find their results, and there wasn’t a way to search though status updates or shared items at all. Now you’ll be able to simply click through different tabs on the left side of the page to jump between different categories, much as your would jump between Friends List on the Facebook News Feed. Another change is the way Facebook lets users ‘Search The Web’ — now these results are shown as a filter, rather than on their own page. And Facebook has also changed the search engine from Live.com to Bing, Microsoft’s rebranded and improved search engine.

These changes are especially important because search has long been one area where Facebook fell well behind Twitter. Twitter Search has become an amazing tool for finding the most up-to-date information on a variety of topics, including everything from breaking news to movie reviews. Facebook has slowly been making headway in this area by allowing users to share status updates with ‘everyone‘ (before that only your friends could see status updates). But until now there hasn’t been an easy way to actually search through those public updates, which made the feature useless to most people.

Now you’ll be able to jump over to Facebook search, click ”Posts By Everyone” and use it in much the same way you would use Twitter Search. You’ll see a list of matching updates from other users on Facebook, and a message at the top of the screen will update in real-time, alerting you as new updates containing your query come in.

For the time being it looks like Facebook isn’t promoting the feature too heavily — the ‘Posts By Everyone’ is the last item in the list of search filters, and I suspect that Facebook has relatively few users who are sharing their updates with the public in the first place. That will likely change soon though, as Facebook is planning to roll out a new suite of privacy options that will suggest that users begin sharing some of their data publicly.

Facebook’s 250+ million active users still dwarfs Twitter’s userbase, so even if only a small fraction of them begin using these new features, it won’t be hard for Facebook to become a serious contender in the real-time search race.

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