I love my iPhone. When I was in Ithaca it seemed that I was one of the few people I knew who had one. Here it seems everyone and their kids have them.
impressive, huh?
At this point I am still using an (ancient) iPhone 4. It has a bit of difficulty connecting to wifi at this point, and if you’ve seen it you’ve marveled that it still works at all with all of the broken glass. Eventually I’ll grab an iPhone 5, but figured I should probably have a job first.
Even though my phone is a bit on the old side, I’ve kept up-to-date with the latest software (iOS6). And while this latest update included a number of cool features, one of the biggest changes was integrating Facebook more fully into the phone.
While you were setting up your phone with the new software, you would have been asked if you wanted to sync your Facebook contacts with your iPhone (or iPad) contacts. This sounds at first glance like a great idea. However, it seems to be one of those things that is mor overwhelming than helpful…especially if you have hundreds of Facebook friends.
On my MacBook Pro, I use Cobook as my address book, and it offers you the option of adding your Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Voice & Facebook contacts to your address book. As a new user, I turned all the features on when I first signed up…it very quickly became way too unmanageable. (Although it did seem cool to have people like Seth Godin, David Ortiz, Rick Warren in my address book.
For Twitter & Facebook specifically, often the only info available is their Twitter or Facebook address. And if you want to find someone on Facebook, would you ever go & look them up in your address book? No, you’d go to Facebook.
It’s one of those things that seems like a great idea, but doesn’t really serve any purpose.
Back to the iPhone/iPad.
While the button on the screen might have made it easy to turn on syncing between Facebook and your address book, trying to figure out how to make it stop isn’t as intuitive. Especially if you’re new to iOS devices and are more familiar with software preferences being located inside the program itself, rather than in a central location.
So if you set up your iPhone to sync with your Facebook account, and would like to turn it off, here’s the steps:
1) Tap the settings icon on your iPhone or iPad home screen. That will take you to your preferences.
2) Scroll down until you see Facebook. (it will be located below all of your Apple apps, and above the 3rd party apps)
3) Tab on Facebook, and once that opens, you’ll see a page that looks like this:
4) Slide the contacts button into the off position, and next time you open you open your contacts app, all your Facebook contacts will be gone.
(Quick side note, if you turn the calendar button on, that will sync your Facebook events with your Calendar app, which might actually be helpful if you use events frequently.)
If you have an iPhone or iPad, what has been your favorite new feature with iOS6?
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